A new UK facility will let researchers build a street, complete with aircraft noise, changing daylight, and the smell of exhaust, inside a single laboratory. This matters because cities are chaotic, and testing how people react to urban environments is nearly impossible to control in the real world. Existing labs can simulate one or two factors—sound or light—but not all of them together. SuperPAMELA (PEARL) fills that gap by creating a fully configurable indoor space where every sensory variable can be dialled up or down independently. Researchers will be able to tilt the floor, swap the surface from asphalt to concrete, dim the lights to twilight, pipe in the rumble of a passing train, and release a controlled odour, all within the same experiment. If this works, it could change how planners design public spaces, how engineers test noise barriers, and how architects predict whether a new square will feel safe or stressful. The facility can seat over 500 people for demonstrations, meaning findings can be shared directly with policymakers and industry. The project is applied infrastructure research—it builds a tool for answering practical questions about how people experience the built environment, from street noise to pavement texture.
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SuperPAMELA (PEARL) includes a range of facilities within the facility: 1. A configurable platform, divisible into multiple spaces so that there is sufficient capacity to meet the requirements of the UKCRIC Collaboratorium (e.g. the 25% provision + more as required). The platform consists of modules, each of which will provide a range of interchangeable surface types (including concrete, wood, asphalt, resin, experimental materials, various paving formats), which can be raised, lowered or tilted in any direction. 2. An acoustic system, consisting of four isolatable ambisonic systems to create 3D ambient sound in each laboratory space, and locational speakers to provide physical sound sources at identifiable locations in the facility. The sound systems will be mixable, with a frequency range of 30-20,000Hz and be able to replicate sounds such as low-flying aircraft, trains, street scenes. 3. A configurable lighting system, which will provide full colour range (RGBAWW), programmable to provide colour temperatures according to prescribed light spectra and illuminance/luminance from 0 to >1,500lux measured at the floor surface. This system will also be configurable in terms of individual lamp units, linked together as required. 4. An olfaction system, which will allow the introduction of odour into the laboratory spaces under controlled conditions. 5. The separation between the laboratory spaces will be made using acoustically isolating units which can be varied for their acoustic properties. Thus the sound levels within each laboratory space will be able to reproduce quasi anechoic conditions up to a large reverberation (e.g. several seconds). 6. The facility will also construct, as required, elements of infrastructure, so that experiments can be conducted on a wide variety of infrastructure. 7. A pop-up seating arrangement to enable better dissemination of results, being able to demonstrate examples to over 500 people. Each of these items will have to be designed from scratch, with the conditions of the building taken into account, and thus the figures contained in this proposal are budgets, not quotations. A full tendering process will be conducted to obtain the best value for money from designers/suppliers. Specifications are based on experience in the existing PAMELA facility.
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