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Building an artificial sun that looks realistic [video]
- rococode 6y agoIn a sci-fi future where people are making long journeys on spaceships I can imagine rooms decked out with these to mimic a natural day/night cycle and outdoor spaces. I remember first seeing lights like these a couple years back before from CoeLux (https://www.coelux.com https://www.coelux.com), iirc theirs are very expensive though. Awesome that this guy managed to DIY one!
- PTOB 6y agoI looked into it for a client's commercial building. $40k each for parts only.
- konjin 6y agoA computer chip costs $1 billion to make. A billion of them cost $1.1 billion to make.
- PTOB 6y agoToo right!
- h0l0cube 6y agoI had a room in an apartment that had no sunlight, and was lusting after CoeLux after it launched. Almost goes without saying, but the first to manufacture an affordable solution at scale would make a ludicrous amount of money, especially with much of the world in lockdown. Low dose UV light would also be a good addition.
- tootie 6y agoEspecially if they emit the UVB light we need for Vit D production
- gruez 6y agoI thought the official advice was to get supplemental vitamin d through oral supplements, rather than through artificial UV lamps? https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/how-to-get-vitamin-d-from-sunlight/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/how-to-get-vitamin... >Using sunbeds isn't a recommended way of making vitamin D.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tootie 6y agoThere's at least some evidence that LEDs can be more effective than sunlight at synthesizing D. There's a specific wavelength of light that triggers it and I'm not sure if a standard tanning bed emits it. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-11362-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-11362-2
- dzhiurgis 6y agoFWIW there's not evidence vitamin D supplements have any health impact (asides from crickets).
- faceplanted 6y agoAside from _in_ crickets experimentally, or aside from crickets as in you hear nothing?
- bearbin 6y agorickets, not crickets
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- monktastic1 6y agoRiding the coattails of your comment to ask the hive mind: any reason I shouldn't try to build the simpler version from the tutorial using a more powerful (100W) LED from Amazon? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T8RDF8F https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T8RDF8F Might not be as awesome as a $60k CoeLux, but for 1000x less cost, maybe it's worth a shot? (Edit: come to think of it, with an 8x10 fresnel lens, it might be way too bright for the size.)
- jtanderson 6y agoYou'd still have to deal with the glare and chromatic aberration from the mirror sheets. Also the area covered would still be confined to the size of one sheet and you'd have to make a "bank" of them to cover any reasonably large area.
- db48x 6y agoDon't forget that the volume of the device has a cost too. The video shows the construction of a really really nice, but takes up the whole hallway outside that room. Most of the time you'd probably prefer to use your hallway for walking in. On the other hand, maybe your house has an attic above one of your rooms that; there will be a lot less opportunity cost to using up that volume.
- jankotek 6y agoIt is much easier to take broken lcd screen and remove diffuser. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4
- numpad0 6y agoThat’s the same guy as this article link. This one is supposed to be an improvement over that.
- ecef9-8c0f-4374 6y agothe point of the parabolic reflector/fresnel versions are the parallel rays
- msla 6y agoSpaceships? I can imagine these things in Alaska: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittier,_Alaska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittier,_Alaska > Whittier is a city at the head of the Passage Canal in the U.S. state of Alaska, about 58 miles (93 km) southeast of Anchorage.[6] The city is within the Chugach Census Area, one of the two entities established in 2019 when the former Valdez–Cordova Census Area was dissolved.[7] At the 2010 census the population was 220, up from 182 in 2000. The 2018 estimate was 205 people, almost all of whom live in a single building, the Begich Towers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begich_Towers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begich_Towers > The Begich Towers Condominium is a building in the small city of Whittier, Alaska. The structure is notable for operating like a small-scale arcology, being the residence for nearly the entire population of the city, as well as containing many of its public facilities. This has earned Whittier the nickname of a "town under one roof".
- filleokus 6y agoI wonder if you could make a better fresnel version, with less chromatic aberration by using a more expensive lens? The parabolic version is cool, but extremely unwieldily... Also, are there fresnel lenses with a much shorter focal length? The dream would be to have something like this in a ≈ 10 cm (4 in) thick picture frame hung on the wall...
- rootusrootus 6y agoI thought there was some people building things similar to this (not as bright) and they were using lenses from the front of LCD TVs. But I may be remembering the details wrong.
- erentz 6y agoThis same guy has a video doing just that somewhere in his history. It's not nearly as bright though which is the big difference.
- filleokus 6y agoNow when you mention it, I realised that the guy in TFV have actually done something like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4
- davidhyde 6y agoThere is also severe lens flare to deal with for fresnel lenses.
- BenoitEssiambre 6y agoI wonder if you could use a spotlight like a bit like this: https://www.amazon.com/Primelux-8-inch-14400-Lumens-Driving/dp/B01GZST326/ https://www.amazon.com/Primelux-8-inch-14400-Lumens-Driving/... to get the intensity and parallel rays.
- andreareina 6y agoCheck out Edmund Optics. They do have precision fresnels but they're tiny. The lenses I've seen at EO have focal lengths that aren't much shorter than the side length---20cm for 25cm sheets. I'm pretty sure this is a limitation on the refractive index plus maybe the precision required for steep incidence angles.
- bukka 6y agoI'm curious if the lack of heat in the lightrays will ruin the immersion of sunlight? Perhaps couple this with an IR heatlamp to add the real feel of sunrays hitting your skin?
- konjin 6y agoThe main issue is the blue scattering. If you can get away with pre-scattering the light before it hits the dish adding an IR lamp is no issue since you're using a parabolic mirror which has no diffraction. I have no idea if it 'feels' right doing that though. For full immersion you would also want a number of different light sources since leds are have very narrow spectra.
- lelandbatey 6y agoThe method proposed in the video already accounts for the narrow LED spectra by using lights that have excellent color reproduction (the part where he recommends a CR rating of 95%+)
- konjin 6y agoIt's not really good enough: https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/sci-tech-projects/solid-state-lighting https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/sci-tech-projects/... Mixing violets and greens makes the spectral curve closer to that of sunlight. Again, without seeing it in person there is no way to know how much impact this has. Using a parabolic reflector however is the only way to go since you will not get diffraction or blocking of wavelengths.
- andreareina 6y agoWithout going into the pdf report, the multiemitter doesn't look better than the blended phosphor.
- konjin 6y agoNo, you would need to pick better diodes, and wider variety of them. 3 greens and two violets + phosphorus at least.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- elevenoh 6y agoCould indoor or outdoor artificial sun products soon be 'better than sun' (for humans)? e.g. has the hormone regulation & vit d synthesis benefits, without the skin damage? Because it seems like we're getting there: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170913193101.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170913193101.h...
- WalterSear 6y agoJust take vitamin d. The reason that people are deficient is because they don't take enough - the US RDA was shown to be 10x too low, due to an arithmetic error in an ancient paper.
- j_walter 6y agoI can't believe it's not the Sun
- pugworthy 6y agoAgreed if you just took some of the parts where he has the window setup, you'd have a hard time telling the difference.
- elihu 6y agoA fun modification would be to add a mask directly in front of the LED to change its shape, for instance to mimic the weird crescent shadow effect that many of us saw during the last solar eclipse. Some other fun things to do with it would be to point it through some plants in front of a fan to get the filtered-light-through-leaves effect, or to shine it onto moving water.
- vimota 6y agoIf you're too lazy to build something like this out but like the idea I highly recommend bright LED lighting for the day (explained here: https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/ https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/). I bought two ~7000 lumens LED corn bulbs and have noticed a huge shift in energy levels from having a brightly-lit room in dark PNW days. I put together a bunch of resources when I was researching buying some here: https://www.notion.so/vimota/LED-World-fce39f79710b42708b92ab5ac82ff5c2 https://www.notion.so/vimota/LED-World-fce39f79710b42708b92a...
- whoisburbansky 6y agoSeconding this, although I only bought one giant 14k lumen corn cob, since I didn't have a good spot to put the second. Anecdotally, they've been great at staving off my usual post-lunch slump. Right around the same time as I got it, though, I started waking up much earlier naturally, without an alarm clock (shifting from ~9AM natural wake up to more like ~6AM). I'm careful about turning the corncob off no later than 6PM, and the earlier wake up time might be unrelated, but I was wondering if others had experienced a similar phenomenon with extended, consistent exposure to super bright lights during the day.
- kossTKR 6y agoSounds very interesting - i am currently in Europe and can see that the price is about 350 usd, and you can get versions from 3000 (warm) to 6400 kelvin (sunlight?). What kelvin did you choose, and how large is your room? Did you put something in front of the lamp to diffuse? Looking forward to get out of the lockdown slump! :)
- whoisburbansky 6y agoThe one I got is 5k kelvin, which was advertised as sunlight as well, and is about as cold as I can take. If I had to buy it again I probably would get something slightly warmer, tbh. I've got a lampshade on it that diffuses the light at the cost of attenuating it a bunch, but it hasn't lessened the effectiveness as far as I can tell.
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- VBprogrammer 6y agoInterestingly I posted this 2 days ago but it dropped into the ether. Ever since I seen it I've become convinced something similar will be part of a future garden office I'm planning. With a IR panel heater to add the warming effect. I was also wondering about whether UVB could be incorporated by but frankly I'd be too chicken to mess with that.
- fireattack 6y agoI personally hate sunlight for indoor activity. It's just too intense for anything involves vision, reading, writing, looking at screen, etc.
- yipbub 6y agoHow often do you go out? I'm wondering if this a habit thing.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI set something similar to this (didn't to be blue light scattering) for a friend who suffered from SAD (seasonal affective disorder) but had to stay living in Washington state for job reasons. They already had a basement with two sky lights and we used Cree 95 CRI LED stripss with a "2d parabola" (they were re-purposed from a concentrated solar project). It didn't do the 'sun at a distance' effect either, but the light quality was enough to get them through the winter while staying productive.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rdtwo 6y agoLeds aren’t a good source of full spectrum light. Metal hallide bulbs are the way to go. 250-400 ways worth has a fantastic warm glow. Bonus points you can grow stuff under them really well
- hendry 6y agoI'm looking for a warm glow for my dining room. Wdym with "250-400 ways" is that a brand?
- coryrc 6y agoautocorrect fail: it's "watts"; 250W & 400W are two common size for metal halide lamps. Unfortunately they are full of mercury and can explode at end of life.
- dylan604 6y agowouldn't that put out a lot of heat? like a lot a lot? that's one of the attractions of LEDs for lighting is they can produce a hell of a lot of light with very little heat coming from the bulb. all of the heat is in the electronics in the back. anything in front of the light will not wilt. of course, i'm thinking in terms of photo/video.
- hendry 6y agoLEDs as you can see in the video aren't as efficient as you might think, since he has a HUGE heat sink / water pump system in place
- dylan604 6y agoyou're missing the fact that that is the key point. the heat that is generated is not pointed at the person in front of the light. in photo/video, this is huge. talent/models don't sweat from standing in front of the lights. food products don't melt/wilt under the heat either. nobody really cares about the heat pointed away from the subjects.
- linsomniac 6y agoIf you have access to a broken LED TV or monitor, or in some cases CFC, you can just buy these. Search for "led panel light", and you can find them in all sorts of sizes. I was looking at building one last winter, but on CraigsList people tend to overestimate the worth of a TV with a broken screen. "Awesome 4K TV, paid $1200 3 months ago, just need to replace broken screen, $250." You gotta talk them out of that with a "A new panel costs more than buying the whole TV." You can also buy just fresnel lenses on Amazon, but then you gotta build the and line it with foil.
- tootie 6y agoHe has a video of that project as well. It's not as good as this version but can look very nice. https://youtu.be/8JrqH2oOTK4 https://youtu.be/8JrqH2oOTK4
- npunt 6y agoSeems like this idea could scale very well with more LEDs of lower wattage, like a local dimming array in TVs. That way 1. heat would be more evenly distributed reducing the need for large heatsinks 2. smaller fresnel lenses could be positioned much closer to the light reducing thickness 3. with a lot of LEDs there'd be a less noticeable grid at the edges of each fresnel lens from chromatic aberration. I'd totally buy a 'sunlight window' product like this.
- crazygringo 6y agoDo they make "directional" or "angled" Fresnel lenses? Because you also really want the light to come out of the vertical window at something like a 45° angle downwards. The physics of it should be fine, I've just never heard of them being manufactured. And then just add a translucent blue diffusing layer on top. It seems highly commercializable.
- skykooler 6y agoI suppose you could buy a big Fresnel lens and then cut out a square near the side, and only use that; it would focus the light but also change the angle.
- corty 6y agoThere are flat sheets of prisms, that do what you need there. You probably know them from pictures you had as a child that change what they display depending on the angle you are looking under.
- lanius 6y agoHow about one for moonlight? My room doesn't have windows, and the nightlights I've tried are too harsh and make it harder to go back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night.
- WalterSear 6y agoJust change the color temperature and brightness.
- kristiandupont 6y agoCoelux has one: https://www.coelux.com/en/news/coelux-moon-at-euroluce2017-2900 https://www.coelux.com/en/news/coelux-moon-at-euroluce2017-2...
- hsuduebc 6y agoWow. For some reason I thought it is already product on market with ton of alternatives. Fascinating.
- jedimastert 6y agoOther than the CoeLux I haven't seen anything like it
- amai 6y agoSee https://www.coelux.com/ https://www.coelux.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ4TJ4-kkDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ4TJ4-kkDw .
- Sephr 6y agoCouldn't this potentially dangerously amplify ambient RF if you follow the author's advice of re-using an antenna dish & covering it with a non-conductive reflective vinyl coating?
- fergbrain 6y agoThe focal point of any such amplification would be where the LED is mounted...so I think it would be a non-issue
- avalys 6y agoIt certainly won’t amplify anything since the only powered component is the LED. It might concentrate RF at the focus to some degree, but only if you put your head right at the focus, and even then it’s almost certainly orders of magnitude less exposure than using a cell phone.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThe 3M ‘chrome’ vinyl wrap is conductive.
- vmception 6y ago... that looks realistic to a digital camera that doesn't record with high dynamic range?
- ggm 6y agoTaking it as given he's pre-armed to be enthusiastic, he projects a sense the experiential outcome is good: Yes, he's biassed. No, that doesn't mean he was lying. The realism is about the subjective experience. If you went into the room, you probably would feel "this isn't bad" before you went to Meh.
- aaron695 6y agoThis is an important problem that doesn't get the attention it should. Quality high density, and dense time based living is the way forward for the poor to the rich. Be it sleeping downtown in NY city to working suburbs in Hong Kong. Good for efficiency and this is good for mental health. This is AR that matters. It's nice work.
- randyrand 6y agopersonally id go with a lot of small LEDs and small reflectors. you could get something pretty thin then.
- kllrnohj 6y agoHe has an older video on doing just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4
- Wistar 6y agoAt the risk of making a too simplistic comment, I must say this is an astonishingly great video. Period.
- hinkley 6y agoWhy do fresnel reflectors seem to be so hard to find? Seems like they’d be a good option here.
- Firerouge 6y agoI wonder this as well, perhaps it's a problem related to manufacturing shrinking sized concentric steps? If my understanding is correct, fresnel lenses effectively operate as a larger lense surface by concentrating light with flat or curved steps getting smaller in size packed towards the core.
- hinkley 6y agoUnless I’m mistaken, you should be able to invert a fresnel lens stamp, make the same plastic lens and then silver it, so now it’s a concave mirror instead of a convex lens.
- thekevan 6y agoDo you mean just the lens? There's one in each of those old school overhead transparency projectors. Those should be easy to find. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/592006-REG/Dry_Lam_50030_Fresnel_Lens.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/592006-REG/Dry_Lam_50...
- arianvanp 6y agoNo that's a lens. A Frensel reflector doesn't led light through bit instead reflects the light. Basically the same idea as the parabolic dish, but as a flat sheet.
- throwaway9d0291 6y agoInterestingly, you can DIY that too: http://www.dr-iguana.com/prj_FlatPackMirror/index.html http://www.dr-iguana.com/prj_FlatPackMirror/index.html And I think they really could be a good option. Unlike the lenses, there would be no chromatic aberration with a reflector, right? Plus, you can set the focal length to whatever you want (taking practicality into account of course). I might have to try it out...
- Daub 6y agoAnyone familair with this: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series/unilever-series-olafur-eliasson-weather-project-0 https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unil... I saw it at the Tate Gallery. It was one of the most impressive art installations I have ever witnessed.
- beardyw 6y agoAh, I have fond memories of that, a favourite for me too. I wish it was a permanent exhibit. His exhibition there last year was just great too with lots of light used in different ways.
- beardyw 6y agoAlso I think those are sodium lights. More or less a single wavelength, hence the monochrome (yellow and black) look. Just about as far opposite to daylight as you can get! It was a semicircle against a mirrored ceiling which is a neat trick to double the effect. People naturally lay on the floor like being on a beach and saw themselves reflected back way overhead.
- defaultcompany 6y agoYes that's exactly what I thought of seeing this! It was so miserably cold and sleeting the day I went and inside it felt like an oasis. Everyone lying on the floor basking in front of that giant sun.
- amai 6y agoThis is not new. See this video from 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ4TJ4-kkDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ4TJ4-kkDw This light is sold by https://www.coelux.com/ https://www.coelux.com/. They might also hold the patents on this technology.
- i6ruce 6y agoYeah, but it show how you can do it by yourself and not spend 30k on manufactured one.
- ElijahLynn 6y agoPart of me is like, no way I want that, it isn't natural. And the other part is like, yes way I want that, what I do with indoor lighting isn't natural anyways!
- gautamcgoel 6y agoDoes anyone here have personal experience with CoeLux? I would like to know 1) how realistic does the light look 2) how much did it cost and 3) how easy was it to install.
- ParadisePrime 6y agoHe did another video of something similar using diffusers instead from a busted monitor. I wonder if you could add a very thin layer of blue tape on the acrylic layer to achieve a similar effect?