A digital twin based approach to smart lighting design

TL;DR

The paper addresses pre-construction smart lighting design by enabling immersive simulation of lighting configurations in a digital twin of the physical environment. It introduces a VR-based digital twin that supports real-time lighting changes and employs CLIP-based similarity to align virtual renderings with real photographs. A case study demonstrates increasing fidelity, achieving a CLIP similarity of up to 87.665% when the virtual scene includes accurate volume, furniture, and lighting values. The approach provides immediate, immersive feedback for designers, potentially reducing design iterations and improving lighting outcomes in architectural spaces.

Abstract

Lighting has a critical impact on user mood and behavior, especially in architectural settings. Consequently, smart lighting design is a rapidly growing research area. We describe a digital twin-based approach to smart lighting design that uses an immersive virtual reality digital twin equivalent (virtual environment) of the real world, physical architectural space to explore the visual impact of light configurations. The CLIP neural network is used to obtain a similarity measure between a photo of the physical space with the corresponding rendering in the virtual environment. A case study was used to evaluate the proposed design process. The obtained similarity value of over 87% demonstrates the utility of the proposed approach.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: A diagram of our digital twin system approach.
• Figure 2: A: Photo of the real-world, physical office space. B: Rendering with missing furniture and incorrect lighting values. C: Rendering with no volumes to reflect light. D: Rendering with optimal volume, furniture, and lighting values.