Welcome to the High Dynamic Range Imaging in Design Education (HIDE) web portal describing work carried out on the CEBE funded project LightLab - Where Environment Meets Design, including video and documentation tutorials, student work and example images.

The ethos behind the project is to tangibly relate, through the medium of light, the proposed architectural or design intervention with the environment of its surroundings and thereby engender a greater integration of environment and design in student work. Light has been chosen as the bridge between environment and design because:

• light has set physical characteristics that makes its behavior easy to predict
• light levels form part of a building's technical performance specification
• natural light varies with time of day/year, location, weather and surroundings and as such relates to the environment in a number of different ways
• internal lighting can be influenced by building form, materiality and orientation and as such relates to design in a number of different ways
• light, although technical in nature, is a determining factor in the visual expression of a design
• good treatment of light, and its associated environmental and design factors, can lead to more convincing and ultimately beautiful representations that are key to integration within design orientated learning environments

For light to act effectively as a gateway between environment and design, a work-flow that involved both is also required, and for this High Dynamic Range (HDR) image based lighting (IBL) has been chosen. HDR images are similar to conventional photographic digital images, like jpeg or png formatted images, but they have encoded within them a wider range of brightness data that more accurately reflects the lighting levels in a real scene. These images can then be wrapped around an object in 3D virtual space to illuminate it as it would have been illuminated if it was present where and when the original HDR images were photographed. A link is therefore formed between the real and physical environment of a site and the realm of digital virtual design, an increasingly important aspect of many design disciplines, and it is on this work-flow that this project has concentrated.

An introductory pdf can be downloaded, describing in more detail HDR imaging, the LightLab project, learning and teaching methodologies and student feedback.

In the menu on the left can be found links to the documentation and tutorials created for the project, along with examples of student work, HDR images and software written for the project.

If more information is required about the LightLab project, or the resources available on this website, please contact Dr Ryan Southall at R.Southall@brighton.ac.uk.

Many thanks go to the Centre for Education on the Built Environment (CEBE) for funding this project.