818 The Living Labs Approach to a Virtual Lab Environment Miguel Ponce de Leon Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland Karl A. Hribernik Bremen Institute of Industrial Technology and Applied Work Science, Germany Mats Eriksson TietoEnator, Luleå, Sweden VIrtual laBoratorIes enVIronMent: tHrougH tHe lIVIng laBs approacH Today, new ways of constructing and delivering com- plex voice and data communication services require more elaborate and distributed design, prototyping, testing, and validation facilities. The idea of a test bed which is remotely accessible (De, Raniwala, Sharma, & Chiueh Tzi-cker, 2005), can provide an open and In the process of designing and developing ground breaking communication services, the need for multiple prototype labs, pre-integration demonstration labs and developer labs with organizational hardware and software infrastructure which all culminate to a virtual laboratory environment in which specific instantiation of the entire service architecture can be enabled is widely accepted to be the way forward (DAIDALOS 2005). Of note, as technology in itself is no longer valid or marketable, the benefits and usefulness for people in