Urban echoes: adaptive and communicative urban lighting in the virtual and the real

Abstract

New lighting technologies with means to control urban lighting pursuant to sensor data in real-time are approaching the market and design schemes. However, there is a lack of design tools for designing adaptive lighting without programming skills. In addition, the communicative potential of outdoor lighting in urban environments is unused. This paper presents a real-world demo of adaptive and communicative urban lighting, called Urban Echoes (UE). The paper focuses on: 1) the development and testing process of a novel design tool for adaptive urban lighting, and 2) the exploration of the design and realization process of UE, a temporary, adaptive and communicative park lighting system. In UE, park lighting reacted to park visitors' movements through a multi-agent system based adaptation process. The system was developed to produce a rich variety of dynamic lighting schemes, designed and simulated with the tool. In addition, UE visualised urban information with light patterns by user request on mobile devices.