Detailed discussions of lighting related technologies.
Conductive ink continues to offer tremendous creative promise, but it seems industrialization has been slow in coming. Although a few years old, I found a couple of beautiful and creative videos showing off conductive ink: Apparently this video below was … Continue reading conductive ink videos
What happens when your Christmas lights become “smart”, “connected” and “lifi”? Continue reading happy holidays 2019!
Acuity Lighting is launching Modulus, a centralized DC-power system option for their LED lighting fixture lines. The first offering is the Peerless Renna linear pendant line. Acuity stepping into the fray is a great sign for DC power in commercial … Continue reading acuity launches DC power options
DecoChrom is an EU Horizon 2020 funded R+D consortium focused on commercializing color-changing electrochromic materials for a variety of applications. Electrochromics are a printed electronics technology, which opens up opportunity to use these low-fidelity but ultra-low-power displays across applications where … Continue reading decochrom
I’ve been writing now for many years about the importance of adopting a DC infrastructure as a necessary foundation to drive further innovations in architectural lighting and media systems. DC power infrastructure efficiently ties together solar and battery storage in … Continue reading 48 vdc power components
SmartEagle is a Dutch-based spinoff of IoT-development company Evalan that uses camera-based sensor systems and AI to accurately detect and analyze desk usage in office environments. They never blatantly say they use cameras, but it is pretty obvious by the … Continue reading smarteagle sensor solutions
We are at the inflection point of a new revolution: DC-power infrastructure is set to replace AC-infrastructure in many, if not most, commercial buildings. The case is simple: Almost every device in a modern building uses direct-current (DC), including LED … Continue reading the efficiency advantage of DC electrical infrastructure
Wave Illumination is a startup spun out of Ocean Optics that is launching a handheld wireless photo-spectrometer paired with a smartphone app. Costs $2000. If lighting companies want to push narrowly-defined quality of light metrics into the market to charge … Continue reading wave illumination
As usual, last week’s Integrated Systems Europe 2019 had some stunning large-scale LED screens on display. For those of you not familiar, these are direct-view LEDs, typically configured on panels that can built up into large-scale, seamless video walls. These … Continue reading ise 2019: the big LED walls
bGrid is an Amsterdam-based startup developing a “smart building” sensing platform based around the Bluetooth Low Energy standard. According to their site: bGrid develops, markets and sells smart building products and services that use state-of-the-art communications technology, with focus on … Continue reading bGrid
Energie IP is a Paris-based startup that is developing a building management system (BMS) based on Power-over-Ethernet technology (PoE). PoE holds promise in architectural projects to accomplish three key objectives: Distribute DC power with inherent IP-connectivity to the thousands of … Continue reading energie IP
Limbic Media is a startup based in British Columbia that is developing real time, interactive lighting controls. Their first product is a sound-activated, predictive control system called “Aurora” with intelligent “AI” learning functions. Beyond their initial product based on audio … Continue reading limbic media
Check out this amazing LED media display at Krasnodar, a Russian football stadium. A curving display that wraps around the entire stadium and varies in height for an impressive effect. The screen is made by Unilumin and has a total … Continue reading krasnodar stadium LED display
Lightact is a very interesting lighting and media control system. There are bunch of features baked into the system that are quite state-of-the-art, such as: Native 3D visualization Control of lighting, video and audio Real time rendering, particle and image … Continue reading lightact
The IP500 Alliance is an interesting standards alliance, focused on creating an open standard for wireless systems in smart buildings. According to their site: The IP500® Alliance is an international industry initiative launched by leading manufacturers, users, and operators. It … Continue reading ip 500 alliance
I found some classic old images on my hard drive of the very first prototyping efforts of converting the Empire State Building to LED lighting, dated from approximately January 2007. Imagine stepping out of the window of an office onto … Continue reading empire state building
Interesting, via a promotional posting with Dezeen: LG is supplying linear OLED panels for what appears to be wall washing in a major museum project. OLED is lambertian, but in a linear configuration, it wouldn’t be the worst wall washer … Continue reading LG oled in the national palace museum of korea
I met a lighting designer last week who mentioned that he is now using Lumion for some of his presentation work. Although I personally haven’t used this yet, the software looks quite powerful. Many of the example renderings are stunning. … Continue reading lumion
LumaNext is a New Jersey-based seed-stage startup that is launching a “smart-power” system for managing a standalone DC-based power grid in applications such as retail shops. LumaNext is developing an intelligent “power router” that can manage DC input/output loads from … Continue reading lumanext
I’m unimpressed by the current hype-bubble surrounding IoT (Internet of Things) as applied to lighting systems. Anyone who has specified lighting controls, or has crossed over from the theatrical world, knows that all of the super-hyped technologies have existed for … Continue reading networked lighting control from the 1970’s: epcot center
