Gizmodo: illumination

Cityscope Illuminated Sculpture is Like Glowing Crashed Meteor In Cologne

Kit Eaton — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:40:09 EST

Cityscope is a new sculpture by Marco Hemmerling, designed to deal "with the fragmented perception of urban spaces" or something: To me, it's better to imagine it as a meteor that just managed to soft-land in a city square. Or, better still than artistic mumbojumbo: perhaps as a particularly odd-looking alien spacecraft. This works even better when you learn its partially-mirrored surfaces disappear at night as it is dynamically multicolor-illuminated from inside. That said, there was a lot of design thought put into this to make it "fit" its space, and the whole thing was CAD-CAM'd into existence. Pretty. [Dezeen]

Kurage Fiber-Optic Chandelier Adjusts Brightness By Tweaking its Curves

Kit Eaton — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:27:00 EDT

This chandelier-ish lighting design, dubbed Kurage3, allows you to change its level of illumination by changing how curved a shape it makes. Simple science really: If you make it curve past the critical angle for the 1.5-mm fiber-optic, instead of shooting through the tube of glass, the light from an LED light source leaks out at the corners. It's a messy, organic-looking light fitting, which is how fiber-optic lighting should be, or so it feels to me... that way it'd fit into my organic-looking, messy home. It's from Schemata Studio, but there's no info on whether you'll be able to buy it for real. [Yanko Design]

Osram Pushes White LEDS to World-Record Brightness, Super Efficiency

Kit Eaton — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:33:00 EDT

It's an interesting week in the world of LEDs: on the weekend we heard about ultra-cheap ones, and today Osram (yes, the lightbulb people) has news that they've pushed white LEDs to world-record brightness. By optimizing the diode, light converter and the package, their lab test squeezed 500 lumens out of a single LED at 1.4A. That's bright enough for projector tech, and certainly makes the single unit good for car lighting and even interior lights. At a lower, more optimal, current the 1mm-square white LED had an efficiency of 136 lumens/W which makes it about twice as efficient as standard fluorescent lamps and 10 times a normal bulb. Press release below.

OSRAM Achieves Quantum Leap in Brightness and Efficiency of White LEDs
SANTA CLARA, Calif. —(Business Wire)— Jul. 21, 2008 By improving all the technologies involved in the manufacture of LEDs, OSRAM development engineers have achieved new records for the brightness and efficiency of white LEDs in the laboratory. Under standard conditions with an operating current of 350 mA, brightness peaked at a value of 155 lm, and efficiency at 136 lm/W. In generating these results, researchers used white prototype LEDs with 1 mm-square chips. The light produced had a color temperature of 5000K, with color coordinates at 0.349/0.393 (cx/cy).

The key to OSRAM's success was the efficient interplay among all the advances made in materials and technologies. A perfectly matched system of optimized chip technology, a highly advanced and extremely efficient light converter, and a special high-performance package all combined to produce the world record performance results.

Potential applications for this high-performance LED technology include general illumination, the automotive sector, and any application that calls for large, high-power LEDs. These semiconductor light sources are also suitable for high operating currents. At 1.4 A, they can produce up to 500 lm of white light. This means that in the future the LEDs can also be used for projection applications as blue and green chip versions.

Dr. Rudiger Muller, CEO at OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, commented: "It was the successful convergence of OSRAM know-how in different fields that led to these new records in efficiency and brightness. Starting with the light converter, we will be gradually moving these new developments into production." OSRAM has already applied for patents for the technologies that lie behind these world record performance levels

Since Osram says plans are now to move this tech from the lab into production, we can certainly expect to see LEDs in even more places in the future. [Osram]

Frellstedt Light-Up Bench: Illumination For Bums

Kit Eaton — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:00:00 EDT

Kind of the inverse of the psychedelic LED effects we showed you earlier, this relaxing Light Bench is maker Frellstedt's idea of the future of seating. You know, the future where even garden furniture uses up electricity and contributes to global warming. Okay, it's stuffed with LEDs, so it only consumes 95W, but you know what I'm saying. With its shifting, selectable color patterns, it's way too nice to end up in all but the best municipal parks, where it'd just keep tramps awake in the wee small hours. Ed. note: In case you didn't get it, "bum" is a double entendre. [Trendir]

TI Intros Industry First Lamp-Free DLP Projector

Kit Eaton — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:59:00 EDT

Hot on the heels of the Optoma pico-projector that uses a TI chipset, TI itself has announced the "industry's first home-theater lamp-free projector." It uses a PhlatLight LED illumination source instead, and a Brilliantcolor chipset to give a 1080p display. This makes it capable of a 50% bigger color gamut than traditional projector tech (that's over 200 trillion colors!) and a contrast ratio that can go up to 500,000:1. The lamp-free bit is the part that will interest consumers: as well as not requiring expensive new bulbs, the LEDs consume far less power so you'll pay for less electricity if you're a heavy projector user. Apparently "multiple DLP customers" are expecting to launch projector products with the tech late this year. [Digitimes]

iPod Scroll Wheel Illumination Patent Shows Two Finger Control

Jason Chen — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:00:00 EST

Apple's in the midst of shoving multi-touch into every single thing they own, which means that this patent for a two-fingered iPod scroll wheel seems quite likely to come to fruition. Besides allowing you to do the "Churchill", the patent details an illumination of the wheel as your finger passes by, possibly making a comet or a little pie shape under your pointer. Pretty neat to see what you're doing in the dark, but ultimately just only a slight upgrade to what they already have. Mmmm, pie. [iPodNN]