Discomfort Glare from a Cyclic Source in Outdoor Lighting Conditions

Many models of discomfort glare have been proposed for outdoor lighting applications. Most of them were built from data collected in the laboratory in static situations, with motionless light sources, which main characteristics (luminance, size and position) were constant over time. However, on the road at night, drivers are moving with multiple sources around them. To fill the gap between static situations and more realistic ones, four psychophysic experiments were carried out in a laboratory to investigate the impact of the cyclic variations of several light source characteristics (its luminance, eccentricity and solid angle) on the discomfort glare. The temporal frequencies have been chosen representative of outdoor lighting conditions, up to 2.6 Hz. No impact of the dynamics of the glare source was found, except for a source with variable luminance at a low frequency (f = 0.65 Hz).