Increasingly competitive markets lead brand managers to search for new methods to improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and promote customer loyalty. Sensory marketing has the potential to meet those objectives. Sensory marketing programs are designed to engage consumers’ senses and affect perceptions, judgments, and behaviors. Ambient light color is an environmental variable with the potential to influence the customer experience in lodging industry sensory marketing programs. Contrast theory and disconfirmation of expectations served as the theoretical framework for this study. The purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to examine the relationships between ambient light color, consumer spending, and perceptions in a hotel lobby bar. Four ambient light colors were examined: blue, green, red, and yellow. The sample included 374 individuals who made at least one purchase from a single hotel lobby bar over a one month data collection period. Data were collected for customer spending and customer perceptions using a server log and customer survey. There were three key findings. First, ambient color did not significantly affect customer spending. Second, ambient color did not significantly affect overall satisfaction. Third, customer spending was significantly correlated with stress level and negatively correlated with overall customer satisfaction, for all color groups combined. The use of alcohol to reduce stress complicates the analysis for ambient light color selection in a bar environment. Overall, the study findings are promising and form a foundation for practitioners to experiment with a multiplicity of sensory marketing programs.

Emergency vehicles are at increased traffic risk due to legal exemptions like speeding or running red lights during emergencies. These exemptions can cause delays and complications in their response. The study explored if warning messages to passenger car drivers, particularly the EVA (Emergency Vehicle Approaching) message, with or without ambient lighting, could improve safety and response. A driving simulator experiment with 60 participants tested the impact of different levels of warning, including the EVA message and augmented ambient lighting (AEL). Participants also completed pre- and post-experiment questionnaires. The test involved a rural road scenario with background music to challenge emergency vehicle detection. Results showed significant behavioural differences between drivers receiving no warning and those receiving either form of warning, but no significant difference between the two warned groups. While attitudes towards this technology were positive, further research on the effectiveness of ambient lighting is needed. / <p>Examensarbetet är utfört vid Institutionen för teknik och naturvetenskap (ITN) vid Tekniska fakulteten, Linköpings universitet</p>

Fringe-pattern projection (FPP) techniques are commonly used for surface-shape measurement in a wide range of applications including object and scene modeling, part inspection, and reverse engineering. Periodic intensity fringe patterns with a specific amplitude are projected by the projector onto an object and a camera captures images of the fringe patterns, which appear distorted by the object surface from the perspective of the camera. The images are then used to compute the height or depth of the object at each pixel. One of the problems with FPP is that camera sensor saturation may occur if there is a large change in ambient lighting or a large range in surface reflectivity when measuring object surfaces. Camera sensor saturation occurs when the reflected intensity exceeds the maximum quantization level of the camera. A low SNR occurs when there is a low intensity modulation of the fringe pattern compared to the amount of noise in the image. Camera sensor saturation and low SNR can result in significant measurement error. Careful selection of the camera aperture or exposure time can reduce the error due to camera sensor saturation or low SNR. However, this is difficult to perform automatically, which may be necessary when measuring objects in uncontrolled environments where the lighting may change and objects have different surface reflectivity. This research presents three methods to avoid camera sensor saturation when measuring surfaces subject to changes in ambient lighting and objects with a large range in reflectivity. All these methods use the same novel approach of lowering the maximum input gray level (MIGL) to the projector for saturation avoidance. This approach avoids saturation by lowering the reflected intensity so that formerly saturated intensities can be captured by the camera. The first method of saturation avoidance seeks a trade-off between robustness to intensity saturation and low SNR. Measurements of a flat white plate at different MIGL resulted in a trade-off MIGL that yielded the highest accuracy for a single adjustment of MIGL that is uniform within and across the projected images. The second method used several sets of images, taken at constant steps of MIGL, and combined the images pixel-by-pixel into a single set of composite images, by selecting the highest unsaturated intensities at each pixel. White plate measurements using this method had comparable accuracy to the first method but required more images to form the composite image. Measurement of a checkerboard showed a higher accuracy than the first method since the second method maintains a higher SNR when the object has a large range of reflectivity. The last method also used composite images where the step size was determined dynamically, based on the estimated percentage of pixels that would become unsaturated at the next step. In measurements of a flat white plate and a checkerboard the dynamic step size was found to add flexibility to the measurement system compared to the constant steps using the second method. Using dynamic steps, the measurement system was able to measure objects with either a low or high range of reflectivity with high accuracy and without manually adjusting the step size. This permits fully automated measurement of unknown objects with variable reflectivity in unstructured environments with changing lighting conditions. The methods can be used for measurement in uncontrolled environments, for specular surfaces, and those with a large range of reflectivity or luminance. This would allow a wider range of measurement applications using FPP techniques.