How sports behavior uncertainty affects player’s visual comfort in national fitness halls: A probabilistic assessment approach

Most visual comfort assessment methods rely on glare analysis in few representative and fixed view scenes, while sports spaces yield challenges given player’s continuously-changing view positions and directions in sports-related visual tasks, existing simulation tools mostly fail to deal with sports behavior uncertainty. This study develops a probabilistic visual comfort assessment approach for national fitness halls by better qunatifying sports behavior uncertainty in glare simulation. We conducted a case study with a prototype national fitness hall model and ran glare simulations under two typical sports scenarios (i.e., tennis, basketball) to demonstrate how sports behavior uncertainty affects player’s visual comfort. The results indicate that sports behavior uncertianty can lead to a discrepency by 4.0% and 11.8% between deterministic and probabilistic visual comfort unsder tennis and basketball scenarios. Furthermore, the discrepency is susceptible to the court location within the large sports space. This study reveals that neglecting the impact of sports behavior uncertainty can result in a considerable error in the visual comfort assessment under sports scenarios.