Scientists Have Created Artificial Sunlight: Real Enough to Trick Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Have Created Artificial Sunlight: Real Enough to Trick Your Brain

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74 pointsarpitverma00728 comments

This looks quite nice, but the cost seems to be prohibitive for all but the highest end customers. Let's face it, if you can afford a $65k+ light fixture, then you probably won't be settling for an apartment that is in some dingy back alley, which would necessitate this fixture in the first place. The video mentioned uses of gyms and hospitals won't see this for years. Private art galleries perhaps sooner, but I wonder if paintings exposed to this light face the same issues as paintings exposed to real sunlight, degradation-wise.

That said, anybody have any suggestions for natural sunlight-like lights that aren't in this same $10k+ price range? Placebo or not, having nice light available makes for a better working environment.

> This looks quite nice, but the cost seems to be prohibitive for all but the highest end customers.

As with all new technology, the price will eventually come down.

Correct, but I am not finding it cool it really reminds me that someday we won't have sun or open air :(

Why so pessimistic, Think about all the great use cases of this tech eg. When Elon Musk gets his Mars project going these will be invaluable to have on the spaceship. Or imagine a nyc with all buildings below ground, above ground, the entire city could be a park.

Hmm. Agree on that Elon is like the creator in Matrix Movie :)

These would be great in hospitals, not just for patients, but also people that work on the night shift and never see much daylight.

True that for people work in night shift will have fun with it. Also countries like Denmark where they hardly see sun will be glad to have this technology.

If we have fake sun and air which is indistinguishable from the real thing, why would you want the real thing?

I'm actually quite excited by the same reason -- if we can ween ourselves off of the sun with no side-effects, then that's one less roadblock between us and interstellar travel :D

It is just a way of thinking :)

insert the “take my money” meme/gif here.

“Light boxes” are a joke. The day these are even remotely feasible for consumers I will early-adopt.

Imagine you are looking to buy an apartment. The units on the south side sell for $300K. The units on the north side sell for $200K. There is a unit on the north side with this light fixture in the living room for $265K. Also, imagine there is a unit on the south side that has great natural light in the living room, but has this fixture in the hallway. It sells for $365K.

In both cases the upgraded apartments would be very compelling even at $65K in additional cost.

They would? I mean, you assert it, but it doesn't sound very compelling to me.

And are there in fact apartment buildings where otherwise identical units on the south/north side sell at 3:2 price differential?

Your example isn't very convincing. I don't see the use case of these as being a simple north/south side difference in light. I think the intended use case is for cramped urban environments (NYC, London, HK, Paris, etc.) or big cities at extreme latitudes (Stockholm, Moscow, etc.), where the market for apartment buying at the low price of $200k doesn't exist.

Using your numbers, my pragmatism says that there is absolutely zero chance of me putting 18% to 25% (65/265 to 65/365) of the cost of my apartment towards a single light fixture. $65k gets you two years of rent in a nice apartment in a decent neighborhood in NYC.

In central London, there are a large number of "iceberg houses", with basements far bigger than the original house. Strict planning constraints restrict development, but local authorities have been liberal in granting permission to develop below ground.

Many homes built by the super-rich have large areas with no natural light. Security concerns often limit window placement, and it is common to design the main bedrooms and living spaces to function as panic rooms with reinforced walls and doors.

I see a significant and lucrative market for this product.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/nov/09/billiona...

Perhaps recessional photo studio lights? I imagine photographers are picky, so those lights hav to be good.

Better information on the actual site: http://www.coelux.com/

How do they make it appear as if the actual sun is off in the distance in 3D?

Did they invent the world's first 3D display that works at all angles without special glasses?

Are they lighting up a standard hologram in a novel way?

Are they using a special lens to magnify an incredibly tiny and incredibly bright light source?

Are they using a microarray lens sheet, similar to how lenticular products such as the Nintendo 3DS achieve 3D, except that it would work perfectly from all viewing angles?

Whatever the case, I don't care about the price; I don't care about the marketing fluff; I just want to know how it actually works. It's frustrating that we aren't allowed to know.

This is really cool! I'd love to have such a thing in my apartment. But since I just read the link on HN about removing ducks:

"Caution: the photographs on this site are real and unretouched. They are not computer renderings."

I just... don't really know why looking at real photographs is dangerous.

thanks for giving the main source :)

Your visual system has to adapt all the way from the bluish light of midday to the reddish light at the end of the day. You can adapt to whatever light is available to you and after an initial adaptation period you can't tell the difference. There is no need for trickery as the system tricks itself.

To replace sunlight you can use any bright light with enough blue light in it to stimulate the circadian system. You can even use straight blue light if you want.

Most ridiculous phrase:

> ... it also produces the texture and feel of sunlight.

Sir, would you rather sit by this nice, blue light or here in this stuff that feels warm like sunlight?

Sure, you can do that with the blue light, but if that were truly an answer, the blue lights would be standard in fixtures instead of a bit of equpiment for greenhouses, fishkeepers, and those with seasonal affective disorder.

Sunlight simply feels different, in the same ways that a fake fire can feel different from a real one. It is warm and inviting for most people, it heats the skin in ways normal light doesn't.

And as far as texture, I'm not sure if I can explain this properly, though I can see it and draw it in: Sunlight makes the skin's transluscence light up a bit differently: Sometimes it wavers and moves depending on what is in the air and whether or not there is a temperature difference between the inside and outside. Sometimes dust sparkles slightly as it drifts in the air. It creates a different glow than artificial light and the shadows are different - the light is steady and more diffuse because the light comes from a general direction instead of a point.

I do understand that some of this stuff are things that people just don't think they see but they are the things that help make a painting spectacular instead of just good.

I think you might oversimplify matters a bit. If the pictures are original, I think this is quite remarkable.

Let me state three properties about daylight which I think this light source addresses very well:

1) Directionality: Sunlight produces a almost parallel bundle of light, unlike most domestic light sources which produce divergent light bundles. This is because sunlight comes from a indefinitely (for that scale) far away light source. If you want to emulate this you need some kind of optics. This is also different from an extended light source, e.g. a fluorescent tube / OLED which will not produce the sharp shadow edges as seen on this light source.

2) Color: The sky is blue, however sunlight is white (unless in morning or evening, where we see some atmosphere influence). The light source seems to be able to imitate this: It looks blue, but it produces perfectly white looking light (as one can see on the surfaces that it illuminates)

3) 'Texture and feel': You can feel direct sunlight because it is warm. This is because it has a lot of energy, around 1kW/m^2. This is a lot more than what domestic light sources usually produce. Typical light sources put out up to 500 lux, while direct sunlight is more than 30000 lux.

All together it seems quite remarkable, and I would really like to know how this all works.

To be convincing they need a fake room where the camera can pull backwards and you can see there is no way the sun is real.

More technical information available here (looks like an EU grant report): http://cordis.europa.eu/result/rcn/58337_en.html

Are those images CGI or real?

They claim to be unedited, real photos.

I'd have a much easier time believing that if they didn't work so hard to make them look fake.

It is real i guess.

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