ARGon3: “3D appearance robot-based gonioreflectometer” at PTB

At the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, the National Metrology Institute of Germany, a new facility for measuring visual appearance-related quantities has been built up. The acronym ARGon3 stands for “3D appearance robot-based gonioreflectometer”. Compared to standard gonioreflectometers, there are two main new features within this setup. First, a photometric luminance camera with a spatial resolution of 28 μm on the device under test (DUT) enables spatially high-resolved measurements of luminance and color coordinates. Second, a line-scan CCD-camera mounted to a spectrometer provides measurements of the radiance factor, respectively the bidirectional reflectance distribution function, in full V(λ)-range (360 nm–830 nm) with arbitrary angles of irradiation and detection relative to the surface normal, on a time scale of about 2 min. First goniometric measurements of diffuse reflection within 3D-space above the DUT with subsequent colorimetric representation of the obtained data of special effect pigments based on the interference effect are presented.