In classrooms, visual learning media continuously changed in the past two decades. Yet, the classroom design itself cannot match with the fast-growing technology. In present classrooms, there are three surfaces that users need to be paying attention to: the desk (horizontal task surface), the whiteboard, and the projection screen (both vertical task surface). Due to the need to receive information during lecture session, users need to constantly switch between these three surfaces, thus a static glare measurement might not be suitable for this case.
This research provides an experimental study and assessment of this phenomenon, by combining HDR photography method to acquire real scene luminance mapping, and questionnaire survey method to acquire user’s perception and opinion of the luminous environment. Furthermore, subject classrooms are classified based on content, lighting scene, and seating section for visual comfort comparison, since visual comfort is based on the field of view. An evaluation of Daylight Glare Probability (DGP) metric is also performed by comparing the glare analysis result with user feedback.
The results indicate that there is a lack of design guideline for lighting in classroom, since the typical classrooms nowadays only considers horizontal surfaces and desk illuminance. On the contrary, research results shows that most of the problems occur in the vertical task surfaces, such as whiteboard and projection screen clarity. Also, the strategy of turning of half of the lights in the classroom is provided to be ineffective. Furthermore, DGP cannot be utilized to assess visual comfort in classrooms, since there are more than one task surfaces, and it is unreliable in low illuminance scenes.

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