Environment setup

• Illuminance
• Color temperature
• Light types
• Chroma surface

Illuminance

The optimal level of illuminance is 1000 lux or more. Levels well below 150 lux will have a negative impact on chroma and mixed reality quality.

Lux level	Performance
1100 lux	🟩 Perfect
400 lux	🟩 Good
260 lux	🟩 Ok
160 lux	🟧 Visible noise, ok in headset
110 lux	🟥 Visible noise, decreased performance
<50 lux	🟥 Very noisy, poor performance

Color temperature

Your lighting should have a color temperature of 3000–6500K. More importantly, the color temperature should remain constant.

Daylight leaking into your physical environment (e.g., through windows) can alter the lighting setup and greatly impact the performance of chroma keying. We recommend that you block all natural light from your chroma key setup. This is especially important when using blue as your chroma color, as daylight can very easily cause false positives. Mixing lights with different color temperatures will also affect chroma performance.

Light types

To avoid flickering artefacts, we recommend that you use LED or fluorescent lights with an inverter. Lights that operate at more than 1 kHz work best. Lights operating at 50 or 60 Hz, while not preferred, can also be used. In this case, we recommend that you use the flicker compensation functions available in the Varjo API.

Try to use diffuse lights that cover a larger area rather than spotlights. Use indirect lighting whenever possible. Lights should be placed so that the user will not look directly at them.

Chroma surface

For your chroma key surface, use a matte fabric that reflects as little light as possible. Highly saturated pure colors are preferable.

Your rendering engine should take your camera settings into account when matching virtual and real content. Note that camera settings may change over time (e.g., due to auto white balance). If this causes difficulties for your engine, you can lock the camera settings.