Spanish supplier Vibia had its usual assortment of very stylish contemporary decorative products.  Yet one thing really stood out:  The increasing number of products that are intended as user-customized clusters of fixtures.  Vibia has embraced the mass customized, almost biomimetic trend in many of the products it has recently launched.  At Light + Building, Vibia was demonstrating a very powerful online “configurator” tool to help its customers visualize, specify and properly install these custom arrangements.  Companies external to the lighting industry such as Shapeways have already been demonstrating such configurators; it was only a matter of time before the lighting industry jumped on this technology.

The software allows you to create a 3D model or import a model from Autocad; experiment with different assemblies and configurations of their fixture systems; experiment with creating lighting scenes; and then export the project report, specification sheet, or complete 3D model.

Here is another video showing the popular “AMEBA” line:

The long term success of software like this will be dependent on how well they integrate with popular parametric architectural software like Revit, Rhino, etc.  No designer wants to duplicate efforts in modeling spaces.