Joe Vose investigates the implications of smart lighting


Joe Vose of Light Bureau looks at the implications of smart lighting, plus comment from Kevan Shaw, of independent lighting consultancy KSLD


fx

Words by Joe Vose and Kevan Shaw

Over the past five years the march of LED technology in the lighting industry has been relentless. The LED ‘revolution’ has become more of a coup d’etat, with LED becoming the de facto light source. Even the squirrel cage, the last bastion of tungsten, has succumbed to the LED invaders.

All of this turbulence is really only the start of the upheaval. LED is a semiconductor, and so the future of the lighting industry will be far more affected by the computer industry than its lighting legacy. The lamp, as we know it – a glowing medium within a glass envelope that emits a predictable amount of light for a set amount of power with a standard connector – is already obsolete. This free fall towards obsolescence is not just about efficiency metrics (‘halogen lamps are too wasteful’), or atheistic metrics (‘fluorescent lamps are too cold’). It is the result of a paradigm shift that will eventually affect every aspect of the lighting industry.

It’s not that the technology isn’t good enough, it’s that anything that tries to replicate (but isn’t) glowing wire in a glass envelope is not good enough. In this connected world, the days of an object being defined only by its primary function are numbered. The lighting industry will need to redefine what our tools of light can offer beyond the primary function of illumination. Lighting is becoming intelligent.

The Edge

A huge trend emerging from the technology world is the idea of the Internet of Things (IoT). The idea at the core of IoT is to change the way we interact with the internet and data. Rather than the internet being confined to a set of specific devices such as PCs, tablets or phones, the internet is distributed through the devices that we use, including lighting. This has been a large driver for smart lighting establishing many of the frameworks on which smart lighting is operating.

Connecting lighting to the internet means far more than having to set up an Instagram account for your table lamp. This will have a huge impact on the future of lighting controls. The control of the luminaire leaves the murky, proprietary world of the wall switch and transfers to your phone, tablet, watch or any other connected device. This might sound like a gimmick, but the implications for hotels and offices are significant. The prevailing design trend in offices over the past 30 years has been predicated on the open-plan principle, moving staff out from their own cubicles or offices and into large open communal areas. Agile working and hot desking are further reducing the amount of personalised space.

The Edge

Having direct control of an element of your environment, such as your lighting, has been shown to be beneficial to employee wellbeing. Traditional lighting control technology allowing an individual control of the lighting at one desk would either be impossible or so expensive that it is beyond impractical. But with smart lighting, this level of flexibility could become commonplace. As the average age of the population increases and people work longer, better lighting control will become a crucial part of an accessible working environment without sacrificing energy efficiency.

Where hotels are concerned, how many times have we been to a hotel to find the lighting is controlled by a baffling array of panels that would be more at home in a nuclear reactor control centre? Your Apple watch can already open your hotel room door, so it isn’t much more of leap to imagine that it or your phone could control the lighting too.

Sony Multifunctional LightSony Multifunctional Light

Your experience could be further personalised by the system remembering your lighting preferences from previous visits, or perhaps taking the data from your home lighting usage to help offer a more tailored experience. As we learn more about the effect of light on the body, for example, it is possible that the lighting in your hotel room could help you adjust to the time zone of your location for long-haul travellers.

As it is possible for your device to send information to the lighting network, it is also possible for the lighting network to send information. As buildings get larger and taller they can easily become harder to navigate. A building installed with a smart lighting system has an inbuilt system of coordinates, not unlike GPS. It is possible for your phone to communicate with a luminaire using the front-facing camera, allowing accurate indoor mapping. There are many practical implications for this in everyday life. For example, being able to be directed to a meeting room in a large office building, or a treatment room in a hospital without having to get lost. As the workplace becomes increasingly fragmented, being able to find the desk location of a co-worker through your phone could become an important tool in an agile environment.

Location data may sound scary, but it also offers some very useful opportunities. The data could be analysed to help you understand your projects in greater detail, for example by understanding which of your clients spaces are the most used and why. It could offer clues to making other spaces more popular, averaging out demand.

SogepromSogeprom

The Pandora’s Box of data has been opened and the internet has spread from offices to our homes, then pockets and is now creeping into the objects around us.

This is what sets apart smart lighting from the lighting that we have been used to: a Luminaire will no longer be the sum of its component parts, but a point in a connected network. Illumination will not just be another layer in the spaces we inhabit, but woven seamlessly into the fabric of our environment, responding to and learning from our behaviour with minimal user input.

While LED has caused a revolution in all but some very small ways, it has not really changed our relationship with lighting. Smart lighting, on the other hand, is poised to totally disrupt our relationship not just with our light fittings but with our lit environment.

A technology too far

The lighting industry is pushing us towards the adoption of increasingly complex solutions under the heading of Intelligent Lighting, Internet offerings, LiFi and many similar buzzwords. While we can see the creative possibilities of some of these technologies, generally I feel we are being delivered solutions to non-existent problems at the moment.

At a point in time when we are struggling to agree standards for the now pervasive LED technology, most of the offers of these new things are based on as yet to be standardised systems, such as Bluetooth mesh networks.

We are seeing a plethora of proprietary non-interoperable systems, the exact opposite of what we are being sold as the Internet offerings that can all seamlessly speak to each other.

We are also developing monstrously complex add-ons to lighting. At the least, more complexity leads to much more design and, importantly, commissioning time and skills. It also adds to risks of failures as complexity increases. It is now common to see cars less than 10 years old in scrapyards because of the repair cost and lack of support of in-car electronics. These not only deal with engine management, but even operate simple systems such as light switching or door locks and windows, as well as safety-critical systems, including brakes and airbags.

In cynical mood I could suggest that this scenario would be a boon to a lighting industry whose market has seen wholesale change from a regular lamp replacement to ‘long-life’ LED products with potential operating lives of 20 years or more.

The complexity of ‘intelligent’ lighting could result in systems where essential network devices fail, rendering the entire lighting system unserviceable. Even more cynically we could look at the way inkjet printers are made with built-in timers that render them unusable after a certain number of copies and wonder if lighting devices might require factory service after a certain number of running hours. Of course you might find that the relevant parts are no longer available so you might have no option but to rip out the entire lighting system. This tactic is already common among some lighting control-system manufacturers whose products are end of life after 10 years or so.

Another potential issue that will impact wireless systems is crowded radio bandwidth. As this is already touted as a selling point for LiFi, we should consider how it may affect wireless lighting technologies. At present, all remote applications, along with other unlicensed radio, are crammed into a very narrow bandwidth. We know that it is not just lighting that is looking to achieve this ‘intelligence’.

We are likely to see exponential growth in demand for these radio frequencies that will inevitably result in problems with overcrowding, resulting in dodgy communications.

There has already been a problem in a major decorative installation in an international airport that was switched off as it swamped the emergency communications frequency – and this wasn’t even a wireless lighting system.

So, while we all want to be early adopters and make what we can of the opportunities these new technologies offer, do think carefully before jumping onto the bandwagon. Think whether this is the only way of doing what you want. Ask questions about interoperability, expected life of the electronics and, more importantly, how long the manufacturer will continue to provide support and spare parts. It will be an expensive mistake if a component failure after a five-year warranty period requires an entire lighting system be replaced.

Philips Eindhoven

Practising what it preaches, Philips Lighting has applied intelligent lighting principles to the refurbishment of its Fifties’ headquarters in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Laboratory for Visionary architecture (LaVa) devised an interactive Led light ‘tree’ with 1,500 reflective ‘leaves’, suspended pyramidal panels that generates naturalistic light and shadow in the building’s new atrium/gathering space. Some 500 panels use self-emitting Philips ecophon Soundlight – an integral product that consists of comfortable Led lighting with sound absorption in an integrated light and acoustic ceiling system.

LaVa used ‘low-level artificial intelligence to create daily light scenarios in an organic and non-repetitive way for the whole calendar year,’ says LaVa director alexander rieck. ‘Scenarios respond to different seasons, times of the day and the architectural layout of the atrium space, and are used to activate or relax the users throughout the day.’ the design team included lighting consultant Beersnielsen, LiaS.

The edge

The Edge in Amsterdam, billed as the world’s most sustainable building (with a BREEAM score of 98.36 per cent) was the first building to use Philips’ ethernet-powered (PoE) LED connected lighting. Using 28,000 connected sensors, this enables employees to use an application on their smartphones to regulate the lighting and temperature of their individual workspaces.

What is LiFi?

Using light waves instead of RF to deliver data, LiFi provides 10,000 times more bandwidth – the fundamental resource of all communication systems. LiFi is a bi-directional, networked, mobile, high-speed data communication technology that complements WiFi, and in addition has the key benefits of greater capacity, security and energy efficiency.

With LiFi technology embedded, LEDs are transmitters, and photo detectors, such as those in your mobile device, are receivers. These are inexpensive, already in common use and have existing infrastructures, avoiding the need for thousands of base station masts. If street lighting columns were fitted with LED sources, for example, they could provide the next 5G and 6G networks.

How it works

LEDs are based on the effect of electroluminescence, whereby certain materials emit light when electricity is applied. LEDs are illuminated by the movement of electrons in a semiconductor material, such as aluminum-gallium-arsenide (AlGaAs) and gallium nitride (GaN). The light emits from the p-n junction of the diode.

LiFi modulates the changes in the intensity of light to communicate data – mathematical algorithms are used to enable encoding of ‘0s’ and ‘1s’ into subtle changes of the intensity of light of an LED. This is done at very high speeds, more than 100 million times a second. Then at the receiver, algorithms convert the signal into the same binary data stream. In the Optima Lab at the LiFi Research and Development Centre, transmission speeds of 3.5 Gbit/sec at 2m distance, and real-time video streaming at 1.1 Gbit/sec at 10m distance have been demonstrated. This is almost twice as fast as current WiFi systems.

Sony Multifunctional Light

Sony’s smart light, co-developed with Toshiba, is the shape of things to come in the residential environment.

Despite its somewhat lacklustre moniker, the Multifunctional Light not only illuminates the space but also acts as a speaker and WiFi hub.

The large (660mm diameter) circular LED ceiling light features a WiFi-enabled communication unit that plugs into the middle and can be controlled using a dedicated smartphone app. This unit includes sensors for motion, light, temperature and humidity, as well as a speaker, a microphone and infrared capability for remote control of TVs and air-conditioning units.

The fitting can be set to turn on and off automatically in response to someone’s presence (also acting in a security function), and will also dim up and down according to the time of day. It can be programmed to turn on the TV when someone enters the room, or used as an intercom, to stream music or record messages that can be played back when it next detects someone entering the house.

The actual lighting bit is dimmable and tunable in colour from 2700K to 6500K, with a CRI of 85. It uses 42W or 53W depending on whether it has a clear or frosted diffuser (plus 3W for its other functions), and will illuminate an area of around 13sqm.

The Multifunctional Light will be launched in Japan later this year.

Sogeprom

The new 3500 sq m offices of Sogeprom, property arm of French bank Société Générale, in La Defense Paris, will become the first major workplace in the world to use high-bandwidth, bi-directional LiFi to provide internet access when it opens later this year. Employees will use a special dongle inserted in their computers and other devices to receive the internet through visible light from the LED lighting.

A photoreceptor on the dongle will receive the data embedded in the modulated visible light. Similarly, they will upload data using an infrared transmitter embedded on the dongle.








Progressive Media International Limited. Registered Office: 40-42 Hatton Garden, London, EC1N 8EB, UK.Copyright 2024, All rights reserved.