LpS 2015: lighting trends, technologies & solutions

At sixty lectures and seven workshops, international experts presented their findings and analysed future trends and technologies. A total of about 1,400 attendees from all over the world came to the event, which took place from 22nd to 24th September in Bregenz, Austria.

Facts, numbers & feedback

LpS, known as a point of reference for technical lighting professionals dealing with LED and OLED lighting components, modules and systems, took place for the 5^th time this year. Over 100 exhibitors showed their latest developments in the growing exhibition. Seven of the world’s biggest LED manufacturers (Nichia, Cree, Everlight, Lumileds, Osram, Samsung and Seoul Semiconductor) chose the event to showcase their products and services.

With 1,400 attendees from 48 different countries, LpS 2015 shows a 25% growth rate compared to last year. Over 30% of the visitors were engineers, followed by 22% sales and businesspersons. 18% were from the corporate level (CEO, CTO, etc.) and an additional 7% of the visitors were planners, designers and architects. 3% were from the education and journalism fields.

Pars Mukish, Yole Développement, a speaker and attendee, commented: “The LpS is getting bigger and bigger. What is important to say is that there are more and more Asian and American companies. The event is getting much more international and is important for personal networking. Participants described the event as being unique and especially stressed the quality and technical focus of the symposium and exhibition. Almost 90% of the attendees rated the event as excellent or very good.

Trends & 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 analyse trends for future lighting systems - the focus of the LpS 2015.

Rogier van der Heide, Chief Design & Marketing Officer, Zumtobel Group, talked about the different opportunities of LED lighting. He went on to explain about the connections between marketers, engineers and designers. He mentioned that there is a transformation of the lighting industry taking place, from hardware to software and controls. Designers 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.

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. 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, Lumileds, analysed trends and challenges for system integration. He sees a transition of the business over time 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.

Over the three event days 60 lectures and 7 workshops were given by lighting experts. They analysed 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, standardisation, light measurement, production and lighting systems.

More than 20 product launches

In addition to the lectures and workshops, participants could visit the exhibition and see 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. LG Chem launched the world’s largest, flexible OLED panel. It was very recently developed and shipped to Bregenz directly from Korea, just in time for the event.

Outlook: LpS 2016

The 2016 edition of LpS will take place from 20^th to 22^nd September 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.