In 2007 the interdisciplinary lighting studio Visopia closed. During the three years I was there, Visopia ambitiously tackled projects designing and fabricating lightworks for the automotive industry while attempting to create its own artistic style through unique pieces. Our speciality was working with LEDs. Unfortunately, Visopia’s best efforts were not enough to sustain our early momentum and the partners made a difficult decision to go their separate ways.

I created LuzLab to nurture the technological fruits I planted at Visopia. LED-based projects pose many challenges if off-the-shelf products aren’t available or don’t meet the needs of a specific project. Consequently I dealt with incumbent problems of LED-based prototypes by rolling my own solutions - developing drivers, controllers and packaging solutions. These were solutions optimized for manufacturing, but with a careful eye towards prototyping.

LuzLab will continue the tradition of combining technology and design to produce unique lightworks. Furthermore, all of Visopia’s designs will be available and supported by Luzlab.

I’m also releasing all of our source-code under the GPL license. Frankly, we spent so much time and energy coding all of our firmware that I would hate to see it vanish. We have already laid a solid foundation for an extensible programming language along with a virtual machine specifically tailored for interactive lighting control. Hopefully with some help from the open source community, we can continue to refine and extend its functionality.


Carlo Quiñonez, Ph.D,
Founder and President
LuzLab