A new evaluation method for daylight discomfort glare

A proper glare prediction method is needed to promote visual comfort at workplaces. Only a few formulae have been proposed for discomfort glare of daylight origin, and they are inadequate in real daylight situations. No standard monitoring procedure is available for daylight glare evaluation on a comparative basis. This paper introduces an improved glare evaluation method consisting of a standard monitoring protocol and advanced formulae. The results, however, are not shown here. The proposed method appears to yield sensible and consistent glare values when tested against the existing glare evaluation system of Chauvel and it has also been coded into a small program to calculate luminance values and incorporated with Radiance to compute daylight glare indices. The method was developed with the hope that architects and lighting designers would adopt it as an easy and reliable method for evaluating discomfort glare from daylight. The future work, which is an ongoing research, is to create the use of scientific-knowledge computational tools in the later stages of design in an effort to provide optimum choices of daylighting design with respect to light level and glare using the new glare algorithm.