Efficient Simulation of Furniture Layout Taking into Account Lighting Environment

Abstract

Furniture layout design is a challenging problem, and several methods have recently been proposed. Although the lighting environment in a room has a strong relationship with the furniture functionality, the previous methods completely overlooked it in designing furniture layout. This paper addresses this problem; we propose an efficient method for computing furniture layout taking into account the lighting environment. We propose a new cost function that evaluates the lighting environment taking into account inter-reflections of light. A fast method for evaluating the cost function is also proposed. We demonstrate that our method improves the quality and usability of furniture layout by taking into account the lighting environment.