Search

The development of virtual reality (VR) technology facilitates reading in a virtual environment. However, how the virtual environmental factors influence users’ reading performance has not been studied. Researchers need to compare reading in a virtual environment to the real world situation and to normal digital displays. This paper examined the effect of illumination (dim vs. glaring) in a virtual environment on Chinese text understanding performance, long-term recall performance and affect. The effect of gender is also discussed. The results reveal that in a brightly lit environment, people show better text understanding and logic reasoning performance. However, in a dim environment, people concentrate more and have better long-term memory performance. These findings can be used in guidelines for designers and virtual environment developers. A brightly lit environment is more suitable for understanding and for logical reasoning tasks and a dim environment is suggested for tasks regarding memory and concentration.

The four interrelated chapters of part II deal with the influence of climatic factors on the historic town structure. This chapter identifies factors such as solar radiation, glaring sun, and large diurnal temperature. Through centuries, people in similar climatic zones, in spite of differences in culture and society, have reached independently to similar solutions to similar climatic problems, although different in appearance, but similar in function and meaning. Sustainable climatic responsive urban form is considered as a creative process, changing, continuing, and renewing over time, a dynamic characteristic which can teach us lessons for the future.

In this paper, a new concept for an advanced headlight system is presented. The weather or the road geometry cause a reduced illumination range or glare which is critical for driver safety. An optimal headlamp system should be able to adapt on a multitude of parameters from the ego vehicle and the environment to ensure a sufficient illumination of the street without glaring other road users. A perfect road illumination without providing glare for other traffic participants and giving the maximum additional information about the environment to the driver is still a hard task for these systems. The improvement of such systems will be achieved only with the combination of lane data and a list of detected objects provided from the camera system with the PSD format data of the GPS (Global PS) and the navigation system. The most part of the technology which is needed for the realization of an optimal adaptive system is still available.