A lighting designer spends weeks crafting the perfect show for a concert venue. Then the tour moves on, and they start over from scratch. Every venue, every time.

Dolby researchers wanted to change that. Instead of programming individual fixtures, what if we could treat lighting as objects in space defined by position, color, motion, and timing?

These objects capture the designer’s intent, independent of hardware. A flexible lightscape renderer then adapts that intent to whatever lights are available, from studio rigs to everyday home devices.

One Design, Every Room: How Dolby Is Making Light Travel

The team built an object-based lighting system where light cues are defined in abstract 3D space, not tied to specific fixtures. A flexible renderer then interprets that design and maps it to whatever lights are available at the destination, automatically.

To demonstrate this, the team recreated a concert-style lighting experience and transferred it across very different environments. Even with changes in fixture count and layout, the core experience—the rhythm, spatial placement, and mood—remain recognizable.

The future potential of object-based lighting could make designs reusable, scalable, and longer-lived. As we further expand this area of research, our focus lies on building tools that help designers measure and predict how well their designs will transfer, bringing high-quality lighting experiences from professional environments into everyday spaces.

Dolby Brings Object-Based Thinking to Lighting Design

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