Lighting design plays a very important role in how people experience an environment: physical or virtual. It serves many roles at the aesthetic, functional as well as the narrative levels. It helps direct attention, establish good visibility, evoke emotions, set the atmosphere, and provide depth. All these are important for digital media, and specifically game design. In this talk Dr. Seif El-Nasr will discuss how she delivers the aesthetic environments that fulfill a designer’s intent given psychological theories of attention and affect. She will talk about the experimental studies conducted to understand users’ experience in virtual environments and how, based on these studies, they were able to augment psychological theories and use them to develop adaptive systems to deliver the art of the game, specifically in terms of lighting color, setup, and dynamic properties all to enhance the users’ experience. She has also been able to apply these techniques to the physical stage and use it for a dance performance. In this talk, Dr. Seif El-Nasr will discuss the systems developed and how they impacted the users’ experience.
