Why are there so few artificial sunlight or artificial window products?

One thing: most LEDs suck at mimicking daylight. The cheap ones are bad at delivering the full light spectrum.

The higher end of LED is slowly getting there. The measurement one should be looking for there is CRI ("Color Rendering Index"). The sun has a CRI of 100. Any lightsource above 90 to 95 CRI is (to my experience) indistinguishable from daylight. The best stuff there currently is are (of course) the Skypanels by ARRI for laughable 6800 USD per panel (film equipment is expensive as usual).

Blasting a 2.5 kW HMI lamp ("Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide lamp") trough a window from the outside is a good emulation of daylight. So good in fact that the poor souls shooting films inside will have their bodies in confusion as they exit the room and realize in horror that it is dark outside.

The electrical bill of anything emulating the sun is no joke tho.

This seems like the sort of idea that is perhaps well-intentioned but would rub many workers the wrong way, like the Amazon mindfulness pods [0]. Employees might wonder why they can't have 15 minutes to take a paid break in actual sunlight instead of getting a dystopian fake window.

[0] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amazon-men...

I'm a cofounder at Lumina - we're a consumer hardware startup looking to build products like this.

We've done a lot of research on lighting in pursuit of building a better webcam (our main product). We found the lights on the market (i) aren't very bright, (ii) aren't smart in any way, and (iii) are way too expensive for the functionality you're getting.

Personally, I use a 100 watt LED corn bulb but it's not very pretty.

We're considering building a light as our next product. Imagine: a light that's super bright, adapts its color and intensity to the weather / time of day / other lights in your room. (If anyone has ideas here, please reach out!)

I’m not sure where there is a large demand for natural light amongst people who both can’t get it otherwise and are in a position to do something about it.

Every home I’ve had (including starter apartments and a basement bedroom) was well lit by natural light. Offices have been more problematic, but decision makers generally aren’t effected by it, almost universally having window offices. Factories (at least the few I’ve been at) are often heavily lit with natural light via skylights.

That being said, there is probably a market in the higher end office design market and possibly for basements, like in the I like to make stuff video.

I think the problem then is “how do I design around/with this product.” Designers and builders roughly know how to use existing lighting products. How do you utilize this artificial sunlight product in your lighting design. Those wall mounted led windows look cool, but I’d be super annoyed if my desk were facing them. The fresnel lens looks nice in that accent position, but if it got in people’s eyes or strained them it’s a problem.

Finally, the two examples you showed are using stock led panels. As others have said, you can get some interesting effects from them, but I strongly suspect you’ll end up in the “uncanny valley” with that sort of lightning- the spectrum and consistency just isn’t quite right, the light doesn’t feel “warm” enough in the infrared, etc.

Try it out- see if you can get a lighting setup you and others love. I suspect the product is restricted to the high end currently because it’s genuinely hard to get right in a way that doesn’t feel cheap or artificial. But I’d love to be proven wrong.

Apparently part of the problem with convincing skylights is that the light has to be parallel to be believed.

That’s tough to do without either reabsorbing a lot of the light you created, or creating a large box to contain the light source.

One of the interesting DIY designs I’ve seen uses a surplus satellite dish, silvered, with an LED array at the focal point. The reflected light of the mirror is mostly parallel, but your light source is now 20+ inches deep.

I spent some time instead thinking about indirect light, like an artificial clerestory. Never did build anything though. When I moved I had plenty of natural light so I stopped trying.

The hardware to create a convincing effect is simply too expensive at the moment to be mass market. You can produce collimated light with either a reflector or a lens but both have their issues. Reflectors will add required depth to the package although it can be minimized to some extent. This makes for a rather bulky install and isn't something you can just hang on the wall. Lenses allow the design to be flatter but the more easily produced fresnel variety won't have the same quality of light. You also have to balance whether to use a single point light source or multiple sources and reflectors/lenses. Cooling becomes a problem for light sources that are bright enough to mimic daylight, this would also add noise which would break the illusion of a window. You need a diffuser of some sort which adds more cost even if it is just a sheet of plastic.

All of that adds up to a fairly bulky and expensive piece of equipment which is why you only see a few high end companies producing them for a very niche market.

Hopefully this can be changed in the future by having the cost of high power LEDs come down even more. Maybe mass production of high quality lenses will be helped by developments in the VR field. There are some promising developments there with so called pancake lenses that could make things a lot smaller.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

If you want one, you can build one following the video above. The result is quite stunning. I've never seen anything like it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4

The one above is an easier build that takes up less space.

Is it though? I find that almost every American I know closes the blinds - the exact opposite of what you're describing.

Mimicking sunlight means providing all the wavelengths, including the harmful ones like UV. Some people may not be aware that e.g. lights[1] prescribed for Seasonal Affective Disorder can actually cause burns if used for too long. They are supposed to be used for short periods only.

The FDA does not regulate light boxes, so caveat emptor.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/seasonal-affe...

One thing to note is that the most important benefits of sunlight actually come from (moderate) UV exposure, which is blocked by glass and not output by LCDs as far as I know.

My own personal theory is that there is a health epidemic related to lack of sunlight exposure from most people being indoors. And so in my fantasy future cities that I build in my head, there are ways that actual natural light is delivered without being blocked by windows, such as carefully monitored full spectrum and/or UV lighting.

Another related issue is the concept of a virtual window that you can see out of. I think this will also be a future trend, since windows increase heating requirements and again don't provide the key UV component of light. Also, for the majority of history, inexpensive cameras and displays did not exist.

So what I suggest is virtual windows that are thin OLEDs and follow the person to give them a different virtualized view of outside. Or using some light field or multiview technology. Along with full spectrum lighting. And not entirely related but I think it would be best in most areas to standardize on airtight construction, mechanical ventilation and energy/heat recovery ventilators.

My Verilux lamp comes with a warning if you are susceptible to macular degeneration. In the meantime, you can get very good high CRI lights from waveform lighting (except in CA).

A friend has the light tube in every room, I thought this was a good idea until I saw it. Everything was very cold and blueish, as if it was cloudy. I actually found it somewhat depressing.

Because it sounds like a "pod living & insect protein" product. People strongly prefer natural light to "I can't believe it's not natural light".

I don't know where you are and if you can buy Yeelight. I think they have exactly what you need. https://page.yeelight.com/skylight.html I'd say roughly 400 usd.

https://www.innerscene.com

If the lack of natural light is affecting you, SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) lamps are easy to find.

Trying to generate sunlight that can fill a room like the sun is going to use a lot of power and generate heat. Also, the DIY youtube versions don't feel very realistic to me, it's probably a much harder (and expensive) problem to solve than just a fresnel lens.

edit: Watching another youtube video, it looks like the DIY versions are missing the "blue sky effect"

I use Vitae bulb. It has three modes - day, evening, night. See their pages for spectral power distribution: https://www.vitaelight.com/en/vitaelight-en/

You can buy it or rent it. One is for 89€ or 1.99€/month. Four are for 299€.

I use it for several years and it's great, especially the night mode.

I don't understand why you need it in 'panel' form? There's a heap of daylight and sunlight spectrum reproducing bulbs of varying qualities and price points on amazon and that are easily googlable, produced by everyone by big lighting companies (like GE) down to specialists like www.ottlite.com or sunlight2.com.

-- Kino Flo - they're really really really great - been using them for 15 years --

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1193255-REG/kino_flo_...

The nuclear reaction at the center of our solar system, our sun, emits EM radiation of various wavelengths. FWIU, there are various devices for phototherapy (light therapy) which are more common in more non-equatorial lattitudes.

Light therapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy

There are various "corn bulb" LED products, but FWIU few of the products verifiably produce UVC light; and even fewer still are built from relatively new (full spectrum) UVC LEDs.

The Broan bath fans with SurfaceShield by Vyv bath fans produce ~"ultrablue" but not UVC or a detachable Chromecast Audio.

There are bulbs that switch from normal UVA to ultrablue and/or UVC on the second flIP of the circuit.

> The demand for "natural light" in homes and offices is very high, and higher than the availability of actual daylight.

This makes me feel as if I was entitled for wanting/wasting a scarce resource.

There’s plenty of sunlight available and it’s not running out. Let’s just make more windows.

I tried the first video, I bought a broken old tv off marketplace… guess what… the lens didn’t work and I had no use for the LEDs… so I had a broken old tv I’d ripped apart that I had to dispose of and some new LEDs I wasted money on… I guess it’s harder than they make it out to be

Are you looking for something like a SAD lamp (light therapy for seasonal affective disorder)? Or something like my friends have: a couple of cheap and very bright LED flat panels mounted above their dining table, in a space that has little natural light?

They aren't LED (instead specialty, high quality metal halide), but if you want a high CRI and ridiculously bright light source, Microsun is hard to beat https://microsunlamps.com I have two of them and especially in the winter I really love them. Retrofitted a floor lamp and table lamp. I don't know what kind of crazy COB LED would be required to be equivalent to them - probably wouldn't fit into standard lamps either but would require a bespoke fixture.

> So, why can't I find many such products for sale?

[1][2]

The big market for these things is hospitals. They operate 24/7, and tend to have many windowless interior rooms. Both patients and staff lose circadian rhythm in such timeless environments.

[1] https://www.coelux.com/

[2] https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/artificial-window-36758108

There is an alternative that is free, going outside more, opening the blinds, taking a break mid day. I agree there is a niche for people that live at more extreme latitudes though. Not everyone has that as a good option. I factored in the sunlight and weather when deciding where to live

It is a hard problem to solve technically. Getting collimated light in a compact space, not wasting a ton of energy while having high cri and the right color temp or emulating Rayleigh scattering. The higher end products are also pretty large.

I am very interested in this myself, and I have wanted a Coelux for years.

You might also find Daniel Rybakkens work interesting:

https://www.danielrybakken.com/surface_daylight.html

http://www.danielrybakken.com/daylight_comes_sideways_files/...

Too much of a good thing? Natural light is really bright. Human eyes cope well, but our devices aren’t designed for it. It’s hard to read a screen outside.

https://www.skyfactory.com have been around for a while -- they seem more interested in the biophilia notion than the sheer intensity of light though.

Seems priced for medical settings and high-end commercial kinds of projects.

you might be interested in "You need more lumens" [0]

[0] - https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens

Sunlight or a sunny day are incredibly bright, so you need a fair bit of power, even with LEDs, to get close to those brightness levels beyond some small area.

Why should there be? It's very easy to get sunlight.

https://g2voptics.com/ might interest you

A proper window costs a lot of money to run...

Daylight is about 1000 watts per square meter, so having a 2mx2m window in 5 rooms of your house illuminated 10 hours per day with led lighting is about 200 kWh per day, which is 10x a typical Americans electric bill.

And that doesn't even include the infrared or UV that regular sunlight has, which you might want for sun tanning/warmth/realistic sun feel - including that would double the cost again.

https://theliquidview.com/

My intuition would be that this can't be that rare: surely photographers are a lucrative market?

Why is there a shortage of daylight?

I was dreaming about making a hardware startup to do just that: sun emulator window.

IKEA has fake lighted windows all over the place. I wonder where they get those.

Because Rayleigh scattering is hard (and the demand isn't there).

I believe there is a company to be built here.

Glad I live in Italy and I just need windows.

The people who put people in boxes without light don’t care about it. If they did, they’d have an office with a light!

Just say no. Add more windows.