Review LED professional Symposium 2015
Review LED professional Symposium 2015: Trends, Technologies and Solutions
Last September, almost 1,500 specialists from research and industry visited the LpS 2015 in Bregenz. They discussed latest trends and technologies for future lighting solutions such as embedded lighting, smart lighting, IoT, Human Centric Lighting, technologies for automotive lighting applications and lots of valuable design approaches. New user requirements demand a shift from a component-based view to a system perspective, including design. At sixty lectures and seven workshops, international experts from the Lighting Profession presented their findings and analyzed future trends and technologies. A total of about 1,400 attendees from all over the world came to the event, which took place from September 22nd to 24th in Bregenz, Austria.
LED professional Symposium + Expo 2015 Bregenz – The Growing Expo area in the ‘Werkstattbühne’ of the ‘Festspielhaus’.
The LED professional Symposium 2015 +Expo was again a high level meeting point for technical lighting professionals dealing with LED and OLED lighting components, modules and systems The event took place for the 5th time, after its initial inauguration in 2011. Over 100 exhibitors showed their latest developments in the growing exhibition, that was even bigger than the last year. Seven of the world’s biggest LED manufacturers, namely Nichia, Cree, Everlight, Lumileds, Osram, Samsung and Seoul Semiconductor chose the LpS 2015 to showcase their products and services. No other event in the world can boast having these seven giants together at an exhibition!
“With this years event the LpS in Bregenz has established itself as the leading technology SSL platform in Europe”
Keynotes on Future Trends and Technologies
With the shift from a component to a system approach in mind, the keynotes gave a great overview of the connection between design and technologies in order to analyze trends for future lighting systems – the focus of the LpS 2015. Rogier van der Heide, Chief Design & Marketing Officer at the Zumtobel Group, talked about the different opportunities of LED lighting. He went on to explain about the connections between the marketer, design engineer and lighting designer. The marketers create a proposition, and technology is what makes it all possible. However, to connect with the end users, design is the key as it connects people at an emotional level. He sees design as the key to turn a company into a “powerhouse of innovations”. He explained that there is a transformation of the lighting industry taking place, from hardware to software and controls. This means that the designer profession is changing. In the past they designed the shape of the luminaires but today they have to pay much more attention to software, content and orchestrating the entire system to make it something meaningful for the user in different application areas. This means that new skills are required and data modeling, algorithm design, voice scripting, and gesture design need to become common design practices.
The second keynote speaker, Prof. Zary Segall from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, took the audience into the world of intelligent lighting and introduced them to a topic that hardly anyone had heard of before: Semantic Lighting. Throughout his inspiring talk he shared his visions and connected them with the existing possibilities of digital lighting. Smart digital lighting in combination with artificial intelligence can assist people in daily life. Light can, for example, assist a person who is preparing tea. It will tell them when it is brewed according to the user-defined temperature. Prof. Segall is convinced that “Smart lighting is all about you and your user experience, and Semantic Light user experience means that the physical and digital space is one, and light is the ‘glue’.”
In the third keynote, Mr. Jy Bhardwaj, Senior Vice President R&D at Lumileds, analyzed trends and challenges for system integration. In his opinion, adding value must be the main goal of using technology and therefore technology needs to be optimized in this direction. He sees a transition of the business over time in on the three different levels of socket replacement, form factor innovation and connectivity and infrastructure integration of LEDs. While the second phase has just begun, the third very visionary phase is the most exciting and challenging. In his mind reliability and also simplicity in applications are important. He mentioned that user confidence needs to be built up at the current stage.
Lectures and Workshops by Lighting Experts
Over the three event days 60 lectures and 7 workshops were given by various experts from the Lighting Profession. They analyzed and defined building blocks for future LED lighting designs, addressing light sources, smart controls and drivers, optics, light quality, light mixing, connectivity, security, reliability and lifetime, standardization, light measurement, production and lighting systems.
Some impressive results of the ‘Out of Bounds Design Contest’ – Students Exploring Complete Freedom in Lighting Design
A great overview of the outcomes of the lectures and workshops was given at the final tech panel on the last event day, where attendees, speakers and chairpersons were invited to summarize the impressions and main take-aways from the past three days. The high number of comments about the lecture and exhibition highlights showed how important the application view has become during the last few years. In addition, some technologies that had not been on the radar of many companies were identified and will probably be implemented in future products.
Over 20 Product Launches
In addition to the lectures and workshops, participants could visit the exhibition and experience the latest technologies. Over 20 products were introduced to the market for the very first time. One of the highlights was the new color portfolio, Luxeon C from Lumileds. It is designed with a single focal length, which means that all of the colors have the same focal point. Worth mentioning was also the launch of the world’s largest OLED panel: LG flexible OLED. Dutch Luxexcel, leader in 3d printed illumination optics, brought its latest technology improvements to the show, most remarkable was the increase of the product build height that now brings all different kind of custom optics within the reach of engineers and designers.
One of the impressive New Product Launches: Printed optics by Luxexcel
Outlook: LpS 2016
The next edition of the event – LpS 2016 – will take place from September 20th to 22nd, again at the Festspielhaus in Bregenz, Austria. The main focus will be on Smart Technologies for Lighting Innovations and novel price winner Prof. Shuji Nakamura will be one of the keynote speakers. The Call for Papers for the LpS 2016 will open at the end of October, 2015. More information at www.LpS2016.com/CfP.