Wow, this is really profound: Geodesic Games released a plugin that allows Unreal Engine to directly control DMX lighting and accessories. You can watch a complete demo and detailed explanation below:

There is unbelievable potential here for architectural lighting and digital displays: Live rendering technologies are rapidly transforming AEC practice from visualizing concept designs to construction site staging to creating wildly interactive physical spaces. Making such a direct connection between live-rendered, responsive interactive control to physical devices in our built environment offers amazing opportunities to connect the “real world” with the “virtual world” and really builds on my previous concepts for data-driven environments.

Our work 4 years ago at the Luminous Patterns corporate venture at Philips Lighting foreshadowed how “virtual commissioning” could follow on “virtual design”. This demo showed how architects could explore and select the various options for luminous patterns physical configurations; but now with the direct DMX connection, we could have also completed the programming of the lighting effects directly via the Unreal Engine, saving yet another “hidden expense” in adding dynamic lighting to the built environment:

As a secondary topic, this demonstrates my previous point on the power of industry standards: This demo makes great use of the evolving GDTF standard.