On December 8, 2015, at the end of ILIAD, our annual public outreach event, our newest research infrastructure annex Living Lab was opened by Mr. Jan Mengelers, Chairman of the Executive Board of Eindhoven University of Technology. It is a state-of-the-art infrastructure of various types of sensors (e.g.cameras) and actuators (e.g. lights) that is accessible via an open ‘Internet-of-Things’ architecture and that serves the research purposes from various departments of TU/e as well as various education programs (B.Sc., M.Sc. PDEng, PhD).

It is not only used for research related to light & lighting in the “Sound Lighting” program, but also for research related to ‘Internet-of-Things’-based system and software architectures (for digital lighting infrastructures) in the “Bright Environments” program. Part of the research infrastructure is also used for research on crowd management. It was developed and constructed in 2015 and it is conveniently located at the main entrance of the MetaForum building allowing for experiments with large groups of people. It is a unique installation with currently 64 professional lamps (32 RGB and 32 iWhite), a set of 3 Axis cameras, a set of 12 Microsoft Kinect cameras and software developed using the Open Remote software integration platform.

Since then we have been working hard to extend the software to allow all sensors and actuators to be accessed using virtual IP and to extend the set of sensors and actuators. For these developments we have been cooperating closely with studentsworking on their B.Sc. Software Engineering Projects and with trainees of the Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng)program on Software Technology. This new research infrastructure annex Living Lab will be further extended for the GLOW festival (12-19 November 2016) during which TU/e Campus will be part of the route.