It seems that some of my former colleagues in the Design and Ventures teams from Signify are starting up a new corporate venture called NatureConnect. Nice proposition, looks like an amalgam of the old Philips OneSpace for ambient luminescence, with Cree’s Cadient and the Coelux concept for a splash of brilliance and a psychological connection to the great outdoors, plus a dash of Color Kinetics to liven up the perimeter.

My free suggestion to the team: You might as well just hide a 75″ 4K LCD screen up there for the faux daylight. You can buy that for like $600, drive it with a $35 Raspberry Pi. It will be cheaper and nearly as bright as anything you could custom-develop out of LEDs and optic plates. Then you could do all sorts of bonus effects like gradients of colors for sunset, Easter eggs like airplanes flying by, lightning storms, etc.

As I know from my 3-year run driving the long-dead Luminous Patterns venture, there is nothing easy about corporate venturing, so I wish everyone on the team success in the endeavor!