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Comment by jclarkcom | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. I’m the CEO of Innerscene (https://innerscene.com) and we make a commercial artificial skylight that uses some of these concepts. Actually the coelux ht25 model is almost identical to what you made but using smaller lenses and more LEDs - however the effect they were able to achieve still isn’t that great, the sun looks like a giant orb and once you get a few feet away you can make out a sun at all. We spent a lot of time working on perfect collimation and hiding lens edges and making sure the view into the sky was seamless and artifact free. I’d say the last 10% of that problem is 90% of the work. :). I think we successfully cracked the nut but currently using a lot of expensive parts so working on brining the cost down. If you search Innerscene patent many of our approaches are spelled out. We also spent a lot of time on simulation and software…

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Are you guys looking at fabbing your own LED dies?

The actual spectrum of commercial LEDs is all over the place when you start measuring it it with a spectrometer, even when they supposedly have a high CRI. Especially if you want some temperature that isn't 6500K.

It was so bad that when I was building a night light for my eink desktop I ended up using halogen bulbs which I could undervolt. The main issue was that I wanted to be able to shift the spectrum of the lights from natural sunlight at noon, down to candle light at night.

I did have big plans for doing a neural network to control a bunch of LEDs against a reference temperature, but having to build and calibrate a spectrometer and jig as part of a back prop algorithm was a bit beyond my interest, especially since for halogens I just needed a lookup table with temperatures to voltages that worked for all the bulbs from the lot I used.

there are companies that can do custom phosphor formulations for you to target a specific output. The minimum order quantities don’t make it practical for DIY but not too bad for a small startup. Our approach is to mix a bunch of different LEDs together to get the color and spectrum we want. Check out telelumen.com for an example that uses 16 chips. These are designed for researchers

I was doing something very similar to telelumen but given the variation in LED spectrum you could get off aliexpress in 2020 I could never hope to match their quality without tuning each led separately.

Looking at the spectrum graphs for your lights I'm seeing the telltale phosphor coating spike for both warm and cool white leds. An understandable tradeoff, but with the brightness of monochromatic LEDs you can get today one that's not essential any more.

With the drop in costs for both controllers and pcbs since then you should be able to get telelumen quality temperature spectra without the matching price, especially if you can get LEDs that have consistent spectra for their nominal wavelength - you only need to tune the controller once instead of for each light.

Yes, the more LEDs you mix the closer you can get to your target SPD but more LEDs also add cost and may not fit mechanically depending on how you are mixing them.

One other variable is energy efficiency, there are a lot energy codes around the world that limit how much energy you are allowed to use to light a space. In California for example it can be 0.6w per sqft. Sunlight is more like 100w/sqft so you end up having to optimize the spectrum for what humans can see and feel. I like to compare it with jpeg compression for light. In jpeg we throw away components you can’t see very well, you can do the same for light for an energy efficiency sake and maintain a close perceptual proxy.

We found 4 chips is a minimum bar for good light and use 5 for virtual sun - more info: https://www.innerscene.com/products/circadian-sky/CircadianS...

Links to your e-ink desktop?

Are you hiring? I'm looking for a job currently. Contact info is on my website :)

Let’s chat! Are you the article author?

Yes that's me! Happy to chat :)

This is a great way to pitch for a job & half the interview is already done.

True!

This is Hacker News magic, I love it

We can be an awesome community when we listen to the better angels in ourselves.

i support you hiring this person. seems like a match made in heaven

I adore the lights by your company, though they seem to be incredibly hard to source in general except for high end architectural projects. I wish there was an easier way to order them directly for DYI inclined engineers willing to pay the price.

Yeah - channels can be a pain, reach out to me directly if you run into issues: Jonathan @ Innerscene

Super interesting! Any idea how you guys compare with https://getchroma.co/products/skylight ?

I love the idea of high quality lighting inside especially for my Chicago place.

its tricky to compare because ours are designed to be integrated into a space and create the appearance of window with a big focus on high CCTs (2200k-40,000k) which relocates the color and spectrum of a blue sky using up to 180W. This lamp seems to be focused on lower CCTs (1800k-5000k) at high powers (750w is a lot of heat to dissipate). Both have similar Rf and CRI but we maintain great Rg and CRI across the whole range.

The one you linked is a stand alone lamp and they seem to focus on red light which I don’t quite understand. Red light (or very low CCTs) is used for skin therapy but typically requires direct exposure to the skin because irradiance levels need to be super high for that - from my understanding you wouldn’t have any benefit from a red lamp even at 750w. But blue light does can have lots of health benefits at low levels (search for ipRGCs).

Why not sell them directly, or via well known retailers, at the highest price point and with the longest warranty?

e.g. McMaster-Carr with a 10 year in-home repair warranty.

And you can still offer discounts via other lower price channels.

> 10 year in-home repair warranty.

The vendor travels to the house and repairs it? One warranty claim could wipe out a startup.

Do you not understand the concept of budgeting for warranty costs in the pricing?

Nitpick, but the image in "Innerscene Health Impacts" is very obviously AI generated, besides any personal opinions on GenAI it just looks bad. I suspect photographing the intern will yield something better.

Well, I think the challenge here is that they need to install the lights in all those settings to take the photo and this would be very expensive. The main purpose is to illustrate uses here, not show the final product. Maybe a disclaimer would help.

Thanks for the feedback! We’ll see if we can improve that image.

That’s kinda cool… is it possible to match the weather instead of “infinite blue skies” though?

I have real skylights on one side of my house and would love to put these up on the other but it would be weird to have sunny skies mixed with cloudy

Yes! We just announced and demoed a sensor that does just this at LEDucation last week and will be shipping before the end be of the year. It’s called SkySync

> If you search Innerscene patent many of our approaches are spelled out.

Subtle, nice. Maybe you can give the man a job. ;)

I never heard of this concept until this post, maybe because I live in a sunny country (Brazil) but I can totally see the use case for countries in higher latitudes, as the sun setting at 3pm mist be quite depressing for people. I wonder if you guys did any research on the effects of having your product in these countries. How much would the impact on well being be?

it is depressing, for issues see the condition Seasonal affective disorder (SAD)

The light here looks really good, but the cheaper (less nicer) alternative is just a powerful (natural) LED light - search for SAD lights

Yes, there is some really interesting research on this topic. It turns out that if blue light centered around 490nm is an order of magnitude more effective at treating SAD.

https://www.innerscene.com/papers/lux-vs-wavelength-in-light...

Because we recreate the blue sky there is a lot of light in this spectrum

I also live in a sunny country (Texas). But still I have "sun tubes"[0] in my house.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=sun+tube

Not joking. Do these artificial sunlights help with the allergies? If yes and if it's not insanely costly I'd just try to get something like that for my bedroom during allergy seasons which most often coincides with no sun (winter, rain here). Even in those seasons when the sun comes out in its glory, the allergies (which mostly is my nose turning into an infinite source of salt water), which were driving me stark raving mad since days - at times weeks, might just vanish within an hour. Yeah, w/o even stepping into the sun. (And no, I am not D deficient.)

Hmm, never heard that before, I’ll have to research it more. Maybe the UV from sunlight is killing something you are allergic to. We don’t have UV for safety and energy efficiency reasons but you could try buying some strong UV lamps and see if that helps. Ideally you turn them on when you are out of the room so they don’t damage your eyes or cause cancer.

Oh, thanks. I will explore more on this.

You might want to test for mold as well

I just want to emphasize how important it is for you to not be in the room with it when it's on. It can seriously damage you. There are stories of them being used at parties cause they looked cool and 12 hours later everyone is in the hospital cause it feels like their eyes are melting in permanent lava, their exposed skin is severely burned, it sounds like a horrible experience. Safety precautions are essential because it doesn't feel wrong when it's happening, but only hours after exposure. Also the lights can look really cool, so unsuspecting people may cause themselves serious damage without knowing.

Thank you for the detailed warning.

I actually decided to let go of this idea after OP’s warning and reading a bit about it. Because one problem will be that I will have to enter to switch off and on and even though it could be a short lived exposure I was scared. Though I’d read more on this what it could kill in the room. The thing is it might not help anyway. It is seasonal/situational and it happens in other places as well or outside if sun is not up. So whatever it is (general guess is pollen, dust, dust mite, sudden temperature changes?, general pollution etc) it is already in me or on me or everywhere around me. So I guess it might rather help more with an allergy test and if I am lucky I can find what I am allergic to.

UV is not so dangerous that you can't step in the room for a few seconds. Moreover, there's a significant number of precautionary measures you can take, like wearing UV-resistant sunglasses when you enter the room. There are also UV lamps that have timers on them, so you can have it automatically turn on and off when you're not there.

I would suggest you make sure you don't have any indoor mold. Mold in an apartment caused me problems some years ago. My understanding is that outdoor/natural mold is perfectly fine for most people (including me), but molds tend to incorporate whatever they consume into their spores, because molds prey on other molds so they try to arm themselves.

The problem is with manmade stuff like sheetrock, where the mold grows and then incorporates the binder chemicals into their spores, which are too small to see and yet get inhaled and then leech into our sinuses or whereever.

I've had problems in both work and home situations. I was tested and confirmed allergic; I don't think most people are, but it was rough for me. I'm always on the lookout for those water circles in drop ceilings; they're notorious mold colonies. Once a natural material stays wet for 12 hours, molds will begin to grow.

Just something you might be able to check off your list. Good luck.

Have you tried an air filter? A friend of mine has a bad hay fever but since he's put an air filter in his bedroom he can sleep soundly again.

Can either of your products be used on a table top or shelf or something like that w/o doing an installation? I saw your product priced at lightingdesignonline at a price I can afford, but I am in an apartment I rent that I cannot easily do renovations on. I don't care about the appearance of realism, just high quality light.

“Virtual Sun” looks really cool. How much does one cost today? Say if someone wanted to buy a single piece or a few (2-3).

Pricing is ‘contact us’ and going to be region-dependent. I would expect to pay ca $ 10^4.5 for a panel that produces the ‘virtual sun’ effect. Same goes for competitors (I know of Coelux but maybe there are others. Not sure how quality/price compares). But maybe GP will reply to you.

Yes, it’s region specific. In the USA sales generally go through a partner. But it is a fraction of the weight, depth, and cost of the large coelux units that run $40k plus install. We also realized there is a need for producing just the sky with great photo metrics and that is even thinner and less expensive. A lot of interesting reading can be found in our interactive spec sheet here: https://www.innerscene.com/products/circadian-sky/CircadianS...

Make them small, add heat, attack the pet market >:)

Haha - actually one of our customers is a doggie hotel chain that has installed them in multiple locations

Is your pricing also a fraction of coelux's, or just the dimensions? :o)

> fraction of the weight, depth, and cost of the large coelux

Emphasis mine. I think this was already answered :)

That's a fantastic spec sheet. Not talking about the specs, I have no idea how to read that, but it's very very well presented.

Thanks. This is our own custom PDF viewer. I made the page by generating images from a PDF and then overlaying transparent text so you can search and copy/paste. This allows us to make the PDF much more interactive (I.e. help topics, forms, etc) and allows us to create URL that link to specific pages or topics. You can actually save the page locally as a single file and open it locally and it still works, similar to a PDF. There is a script that bundles all the content into a single page as base64 data. As HtMl it loads a lot faster than a PDF and generally smaller. 10 years ago this would have been a major undertaking to create but with AI and rich libraries available today it was just a couple of days work.

10^4.5 = 31622.77

As an approximation, 10^0.5 = pi = 3, so $30k was what my mind immediately jumped to

Hope Oracle doesn't sue them somehow ;)

I don’t understand, is this a general jab at Oracle or was there something specific to this topic?

Oracle bought Sun (Microsystems), and you are selling Virtual Sun?

Ah! :) :)

This is simultaneously really cool technology, like a hyper-specialized analog light field display with health benefits, and yet there's also something dystopically unsettling about the sun being faked by a machine in a box.

Please don't have your marketing department destroy the real sun. Doing so would break antitrust regulations.

Yes! We started out building light field displays and originally used digital displays (arrays of micro LCD screens) - the result was super awesome but had a long road to becoming becoming a commercially viable product so pivoted to analog use cases which are a lot more energy efficient meaning we could achieve a lot brighter output.

I'm very impressed that Innerscene provides LM-63 data for your artificial skylights. Is there any chance you'd be open to providing Spectral Similarity Index scores for your skylight? I think it would really differentiate your product and show how much your company cares about quality.

We provide full 1nm resolution SPDs in our download section so you can do any kind of calculations you want. Worth noting the SPDs change a lot depending on the color temperature of the light. In terms of similarity, trying to match sunlight exactly is not ideal because UV is bad for you and IR is a lot of water energy that can be produced in other ways more efficiently. For energy efficiency we focus on the spectrum that is most important for humans (versus plants, fish, etc). This is mostly the visible spectrum as align with our cones and the blue spectrum aligned with our ipRGCs. Most people don’t know about ipRGCs so we have a research page about this here: https://www.innerscene.com/research For the visible spectrum we target 90+ CRI for the full CCT range (3000-40,000k) but it goes as high as 98 and even R9 goes up to 9& as well. You might find this content about ipRGCs and melanopic light interesting

https://www.innerscene.com/products/circadian-sky/CircadianS...

Thank you! I’m sorry I overlooked those files. I greatly appreciate this perspective and research.

It’s clear that your company leaves no stone unturned.

I have a bunch of related questions so I will drop them all here:

* You mentioned focusing the spectrum on humans, but I have always wanted to have light that works well for both humans and plants (e.g. houseplants) as they are also beneficial for human spaces. Why not do both?

* Exposure to near IR has significant health benefits and seems like it should be included in an ideal lighting fixture that attempts to replicate the sun: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9855677/

What do you mean when you say IR can be produced in other ways more efficiently?

* How does your product compare with the Yuji Skyline?

For broadband IR, using a gas IR heater will give you the cheapest output - followed by an electric heater. Hard to compete with devices design specifically for heating when you are trying to do fancy optics in a compact form factor at the same time.

Yuji is similar to a lot of Chinese brands doing something similar which is a backlit Raileigh Scattering panel. The show images of the sun in their marketing and sharp sunbeams on the wall, but these are complete fiction. The also advertise color tuning, but the only natural color they can produce is a blue because Rayleigh Scattering doesn't allow very good color control. Still, for some applications like wall washing if you don't need a dynamic sky color and you can hide the view of the sun it could be a reasonable option.

We haven't researched plants a ton, but did some test to confirm they can grow under this light. Here is a cool time lapse video showing this in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TDIVnXfE9I

I was thinking of building my own, but you might have saved me from that. I couldn't find pricing for the modules on the website, but, if possible, I'd love to discuss this. My e-mail is easily findable on my profile. Also, there are no agents in Ireland.

Was the skylight in the season 25 episode of Grand Designs [1] made by your company?

[1] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x97hx8g (from 39 mins in)

Yes! Good eye. They installed a pretty early version of our product - I think it took 4-5 years for the episode to finally come out

Hi, I couldn't figure it out on your site but on the picture where you have your hand under the virtual sun[1], do you feel the warmth of the "sun" on your hand as you'd feel it with the real sun?

[1] - https://www.innerscene.com/_next/image?url=%2F_next%2Fstatic...

No, there is no IR to speak of, however a lot of people tell us they feel warmer when they stand under it - just a psychological effect but interesting to observe

Would you ever consider making a product that emits some level of IR? Or even a very small amount of UV? Would be amazing for the winter months, even if it was just a very small amount.

UL safety cortication and energy regulations make it difficult to add UV and IR, UV because it can easily damage people's eyes and IR because it introduces too much heat which can be a fire or touch/burn risk. Energy regulations also limit how much wattage you can put into lighting, if most of that energy goes into creating IR (like real sunlight) then you won't comply with those regulations. For now it's better to buy a separate space heater to create IR, then you could also use a cheaper energy source like gas.

I'm curious, why do you only sell via agents and provide no rough pricing information online?

I suspect that there are other people like me out there. Forcing me to talk to an agent to just get an idea of the price, even if I'm willing to pay a fair amount, is an automatic pass. A buy now button though, I'd be willing to do that and then discuss anything else.

wow, these look awesome (on your marketing page ;)) I understand the pricing might depend on many factors including the location and the agent, but could you give a ballpark, such as "don't start looking for an agent if you want to spend less than X?"

What I learned over time is that if a product/service requires contacting an agent or a salesperson, then its price is only affordable for businesses and is not intended for regular consumers.

Probably true and in the same category of wisdom as the old saying: "if you need to ask, you cannot afford it".

Does this actually give you the same intensity as sunlight? Or well, close enough to it that the light can diffuse into the rest of the room? In my experience my 4000lm projector doesn't have anywhere near the intensity to properly approach sunlight.

Outside direct sunlight can be 100,000 lux. With one fixture if you are standing in the sunbeam you are more likely to be at 2000 lux which is a long way off. You can add more fixtures to increase the light you are getting. However it turns out that one of the most important parts of natural light is “melanopic lux” which comes from light centered around 490nm (blue), if you get more or this spectrum it can have the same effect as having a lot more light from a low blue Light fixture. (I.e typical 2700k bulb) Some info about this; https://www.innerscene.com/products/circadian-sky/CircadianS... There is now a lot of research that looks into how much of this blue light you need and architects are starting to incorporate this into Building designs.

How do you guys go about doing sheet metal design? It looks pretty clean

Thanks! It’s powder coating that gives it a super clean look, great for sales demos but I’d suggest that anything not visible from the room side should be cost optimized

Yeah definitely, I’m more referring to the bending process, material selection, fastener types, etc. It seems like quite the art form

Oh, gotcha. we don’t do that in-house but lots of companies are available that specialize in this - probably one near you if search for sheet metal fabricators.

Why aren't there prices and an order form on your website?

Totally makes sense that things like seamless edge blending and fine-tuned collimation end up being the biggest challenges

Are there any high-resolution photos of these panels in real spaces? I can only find renders.

here is an example install, this is not a render (the window is real but the skylight is not) https://www.innerscene.com/gallery/residential-virtual-sun

Here is a video showing the units suspended in the air https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/e0p4rsx31cqag42cklc61/A7_free...

It’s infuriating that you only have “accept all cookies” and no other options.

Oh but I do absolutely love this concept. I’m curious if you’ve had lots of interest from these billionaires building bunkers, if that story is even true!

Not a bunker per say but I recently learned that in some states/cities you don’t pay property taxes on square footage below ground so you end up with people building more space below than above ground and Virtual Sun can make it feel like above ground space. Just visited a billionaire project last week where this was the case.

Kinda hilarious that the people with the money to pay those property taxes would go to such lengths to avoid them.

Still, I'll keep this in mind on the off chance it ever becomes relevant to me.

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