Our Living Lab uses the UCL East campus and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) as a connected testbed, where research, teaching, and partnerships are trialled in real settings and informed by continuous data. From the outset the Park was designed to bring people and nature together and is a wonderful mix of waterways, wetlands, meadows, and new neighbourhoods, and so it is a natural home for this approach.
UCL East Campus Living Lab
On campus we run the Garden Lab, an instrumented rooftop habitat with wild planting, a small pond seeded from a restored “ghost pond”, and several test-bed planters. A public digital twin (a virtual version of the garden that updates with live data) allows experiments and conditions to be explored online. Across One Pool Street and Marshgate, a campus-wide network of sensors monitors the indoor environment (for example energy use, air quality, temperature, and occupancy). These streams support a campus digital twin for testing ideas and improving building performance.
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Living Lab
In the Park we are part of the wider living-lab led by the QEOP Innovation District who are developing Digital Frontiers, which is a shared platform that pulls live information from sensors and creates a Park-wide digital twin to help partners monitor the environment, and scale successful pilots. Within this setting we operate different wildlife sensor networks, including an edge-AI acoustic network running since 2017. These automated smart sensors listen to the sounds that birds and bats make, identify the calls to species and report back in real-time to understand the health of the environment. We also monitor water quality with local citizen-science groups and other Park organisations. These data support biodiversity targets and the design of cooling and flood-management measures that improve everyday life.
How we work
We co-produce projects with communities and partners, and test ideas through digital twins and rapid prototyping. Data from campus and Park deployments are open, auditable, and designed for real-world use, informing planning standards, investment cases, and day-to-day management.
Get involved
The Living Lab supports teaching, training, and live research. To pilot a solution, contribute data, or co-design a study, please contact the UCL People & Nature Lab team.