Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinlexow | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea behind it, and understand that the solution shown—which is more of an artistic installation rather than a real alternative for screens—is meant to serve as a conversation starter. How about, in the next step, developing an app based on this idea that uses the light sensor typically integrated in screens in combination with the local time of day and the respective sunrises and sunsets to regulate screen brightness? I’d be interested in how many users would engage in this experiment.

View on HN

Mac laptops have been doing the light sensor thing for the longest time.

More recently TrueTone also does tone mapping to adjust for colour perception from the environment. Not to be confused with Night Shift, which "merely" biases the colour profile based on time of day.

Lunar.app aims to bring all of this to external displays/clamshell mode. It can use an external sensor.

https://lunar.fyi/sensor

So the experiment is kind of out there already :)

Controlling brightness means there is brightness to control, IOW there's a flashlight pointing at your eyes. The post's experiment removes the flashlight altogether. The above tries to make the flashlight less impactful on the eye, but it's still a flashlight.

this makes the device more usable in low-light conditions. the DayLight Computer is deliberately un-usable in low-light conditions.

The post you’re replying to was responding to the question posed in the above comment:

> How about, in the next step, developing an app based on this idea that uses the light sensor typically integrated in screens in combination with the local time of day and the respective sunrises and sunsets to regulate screen brightness?

Basically saying that what the above post was asking for already exists.

They weren’t trying to improve on the DayLight computer.

i interpreted:

> to regulate screen brightness [such that it emulates the daylight computer]

i.e. turn the brightness all the way down in low-light environments, making the display useless. it would be a way to have the daylight computer "experience" without building/modifying hardware.

If you set the screen brightness and background color right, you can make a screen look like paper or maybe an e-ink display. Unfortunately, the illusion can break within minutes if clouds are moving in the sky. Also the screen doesn't reflect like paper if viewed at different angles. Nevertheless, I wonder how well it would work to do such a calibration with a sensor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com