A custom-built facility in the UK will let researchers control sound, light, smell, and even the tilt of the floor to recreate any urban environment indoors. This matters because cities are complex, messy places where noise, lighting, air quality, and ground surfaces all interact in ways that are nearly impossible to study in the real world. Existing labs can test one or two factors at a time, but PEARL is designed to combine them all—from the rumble of a low-flying aircraft to the glare of streetlights and the smell of traffic fumes—in a single, repeatable space. The facility’s floor is made of interchangeable modules (concrete, asphalt, wood, resin) that can be raised, lowered, or tilted, while separate acoustic zones and programmable full-colour lighting allow researchers to simulate a quiet suburban street one day and a busy train station the next. If successful, PEARL will give engineers, planners, and policymakers a controlled testbed to understand how people and infrastructure respond to real-world conditions. This could improve the design of public spaces, transport hubs, and emergency evacuation routes, and help make cities more accessible, safer, and quieter—without waiting for a real-world experiment to go wrong.
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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 visually isolating units which can be located in the space as required. Thus the lighting setups within each laboratory space will be able to be independent of each other. 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. 8. A dedicated 'open-access' design of the building and facilities public so that full co-creation of research with the public can be a realistic opportunity 9. A custom-built building to house the PEARL facility Each of these items has been designed from scratch, with the conditions of the building taken into account. Where costs are not quotes, they will be subject to tender through the normal public procurement process in order to test the prices and thus these figures contained in this proposal are budgets, not quotations. Specifications are based on experience in the existing PAMELA facility.
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