Controlling Urban Lighting by Human Motion Patterns Results from a Full Scale Experiment Esben S. Poulsen Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology Aalborg University Denmark espo@create.aau.dk Hans J. Andersen Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology Aalborg University Denmark hja@create.aau.dk Ole B. Jensen Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology Aalborg University Denmark obj@create.aau.dk Rikke Gade Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology Aalborg University Denmark rg@create.aau.dk Tobias Thyrrestrup Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology Aalborg University Denmark toth@create.aau.dk Thomas B. Moeslund Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology Aalborg University Denmark tbm@create.aau.dk ABSTRACT This paper presents a full-scale experiment investigating the use of human motion intensities as input for interactive illumination of a town square in the city of Aalborg in Denmark. As illuminators sixteen 3.5 meter high RGB LED lamps were used. The activity on the square was monitored by three thermal cameras and analysed by computer vision software from which motion intensity maps and peoples trajectories were estimated and used as input to control the interactive illumination. The paper introduces a 2-layered interac- tive light strategy addressing ambient and effect illumination crite- ria totally four light scenarios were designed and tested. The result shows that in general people immersed in the street lighting did not notice that the light changed according to their presence or actions, but people watching from the edge of the square noticed the in- teraction between the illumination and the immersed persons. The experiment also demonstrated that interactive can give significant power savings. In the current experiment there was a difference of 92% between the most and less energy consuming light scenario. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Architecture; K.4.0 [Computers and Society]: General General Terms Human Factors, Experimentation, Design. Keywords Urban Light Design, Urban Lighting, Responsive Light Design, In- teractive Illumination. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. MM’12, October 29–November 2, 2012, Nara, Japan. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1089-5/12/10 ...$15.00. 1. INTRODUCTION For the first time in human history, more than half of the human population inhabits urban environments, and this now presents it- self as second nature to humans. The urban context is of a very complex nature and is composed by a multitude of different net- works, infrastructures and volumes. The city has become the dom- inant scenery for everyday life. As such it presents still greater de- sign challenges for an improved urban spatial performance, which can adapt to changes and present inspiring, efficient and stimulating public spaces. One must acknowledge that urban spaces are sites of movement and interaction that contain unused potential [15, 16]. If we can monitor and potentially understand how the urban space is used in terms of movement and occupancy patterns, we can generate site- specific maps that can be used to control elements in the environ- ment such as the illumination,. People will in this way interact direct or indirect with elements in the environments, thus establish an exchange also described as feedback in the world of computation. The study of feedback in computer systems, describing the relationship between sensor and acting environments, can be tracked back to Norbert Wieners [29] notion of cybernetics; a marriage of control theory, information science, and biology that seeks to explain the common principles of control and communication in both animals and machines [29]. Since then much work has been done in the field of computer hu- man interaction. Research fields such as robotics [1], responsive environments [19], situated technologies [24] all contributes to a particular focus within the field of sensing and responding to change. Inspired by the cybernetic notions from Gorden Pask [22] Us- man Haque presents experiments that utilize sensor technologies and lighting as part of a larger collective constructed environment where people and objects collaboratively create social domains as in the case of Sky Ear and Open Burble [11]. In the two cases en- vironmental feedback between weather systems (electromagnetic waves and local winds) and social actors are essential in the tempo- rary composition of the color and the intensity of the light. Hence the balloons mediate a direct relation between subjects and weather phenomena, it establish a platform for conversations, between the humans, calling a balloon, causing waves of light to appear between the sky ear and the observers. On the level of the subject, internal conversations presents questions related to the level of engagement; 339 Area Chair: Hirokazu Kato