Light at Play – Creating Vitreous Light Effects by RGB LED Lighting Application

“Lustre: The Way Light interacts with the Surface of a Crystal, a Rock, or a Mineral”.

The word ‘Lustre’ (also referred to as ‘Luster’) traces its origins back to the latin word ‘lux’, meaning “light”. Generally, it implies a radiance, gloss, or sparking brilliance appearance of an object lit by day- or artificial light.

A variety of terms are used to describe this sparkling light effect, such as earthy, metallic, greasy, and silky. Similarly, the term ‘vitreous’ (derived again from Latin, here from the word glass, vitrum) refers to a ‘glassy lustre’ as we display it here.

Lustre varies over a wide continuum, and so there are no rigid boundaries between the different types of lustre.
The terms are frequently combined to describe intermediate types of lustre.

Light-at-Play
It liturally became my passion to mess around with RGB LED light units and transparent items, such as optics or, like in this case balls of broken crystal glass to optimize the lustre effect. Exciting to see what happens!

If you want more footage, just refer to my Pinterest board ‘Lustre RGB Effects‘. Enjoy!

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Optogenetics: Controlling the Brain with Light

This short blogpost illustrates optogenetics — a radical new technology for controlling brain activity with light that I recently rediscovered. Optogenetics is an emerging field of research that is combing ‘optics‘ with ‘genetics’ to modify the activities of brains.

Researchers genetically modify certain neurons to activate when they receive pulses of light. This is part of the medical field that is studying how to stimulate specific areas of the brain to relieve a host of chronic neurological aliments ranging from depression to Parkinson’s disease.

This post might be a bit ‘out-of-the-box’, and too research minded. But it think this interesting topic is worth mentioning. Impressive to see what the power of optics and light can do, especially related to the human body and brains. Finally, here’s a movie from MITTechTV explaining this new phenomenon in research:

[Pictures and animations in this post are courtesy of Sputnik Animation, Ed Boyden, and McGovern Institute for Brain Research.]

Featured Article: “The 3D Printing Eleven – How 3D Printing Enables the Lighting Revolution”

“Benefits of 3D Printing Technologies for the Lighting Industry by Lighting-Inspiration.com”

Recently, the Lighting-Inspiration.com Blog started to feature an extensive range of articles on how the arrival of 3D printing technology will change the future of manufacturing, especially within the global lighting industry. 3D printing will impact the design, engineering, manufacturing, supply and application of lighting and enable solutions that were never able to create before. By publishing the 11-fold article, Lighting-Inspiration.com aims to take away the uncertainties and ignorance about this new way of making and how it will impact a certain discipline of a lighting companies’ business.

Join the 3D Printing Journey
Anyone working with light, from technical engineering professionals at the one hand to lighting specifiers such as lighting designers and project planners at the other hand, is encouraged to start discovering the renewed possibilities that appear with the coming of additive manufacturing. A full range of in-depth articles show step by step the various benefits for the industry and clearly explains them in more detail. The separate steps are foreseen with practical examples that will be definitely be recognized by the readers.

3DP11: The 3D Printing Eleven Benefits for Lighting
The benefits that are brought to the industry are centered around 11 different principles: “The 3D Printing Eleven“. Each of the individual bullets below contains an underlaying page where you’ll find the listed topic worked out in more detail.

1. No Upfront Investments
2. Greater Product Variety
3. Complexity is Free
4. Easy Iterations
5. No Assembly Required
6. Shortened Lead Times
7. Unparalleled Design Freedom
8. Zero Manufacturing Skills
9. Reduced Material Waste
10. Multi-material Applications
11. Exact Part Replication

Time-to-time publications
From time to time, new contributions, product examples and success stories will be added to the Lighting-Inspiration.com Blog in order to fully explain on the developments that empower the rapid changing state of the industry. 3D printing is seen as a highly disruptive technology, and thanks to the ongoing digitization, and a lot of new possibilities where we even can’t dream of today are ahead the road.

Start to discover the benefits of 3D printing for your business today! Please discover more about the features of 3D printing technology for lighting professionals at the blog 3DPrinting.Lighting.

Lighting the Future: LEDs & OLEDs – How it Works

Recently, I discovered a video about Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and Organic LEDs (OLEDs). How they work, the difference between them, clearly explained by inside industry experts. Learn about the inventors of the lights at the end of the program.

LEDs use pn junctions where holes and free electrons combine to form a photon at the boundary between the p and n type materials. The OLED uses thin organic (molecule with carbon) layers evaporated or deposited on a flat substrate material.

Please take a few minutes of your time to learn about these basics of future lighting inspiration. It might help you to understand the opportunities with and application of 3D printed optics as well.

Simplifying Optical Prototyping by ‘Printoptical Technology’

“How Additive Optical Manufacturing can help OEM Lighting Manufactures and Optical Designers creating new designs, customize them and change optical products easily, market them faster, and increase the overall supply chain efficiency along the way”

Birth of a new Key Technology
‘Printoptical Technology’ is a new industry key in additive manufacturing and volume production of LED lighting optics, innovated by the Dutch LUXeXceL Group. It is a brand new form of “additive manufacturing’, otherwise known as 3D printing, focusing on the ‘on-demand’ printing of prototypes, mid – and high volume series of LED lighting optics.

Printoptical Revolution
I recently noticed that experts have called this year 2012 “the year of 3D-printing” and they expect this technology in general to break into the mainstream market on short term with new industrial viability. As “industry insider” I think they’re right. As part of this, the coming of Printoptical Technology will stimulate and speed up that process of market change significantly. Personally, I believe that this new (disruptive) Printoptical Technology is going to cause a revolution in the manufacturing of optics and will change the manufacturing landscape as we know it dramatically.

The so called “Printoptical Revolution” has started early 2011 and the developments to the technology have allowed companies involved in the LED lighting industry saving time and money, while significantly shortening the time-to-market and increasing customization capabilities at the same time.

Printoptical Technology – at a glance
Let me highlight some key benefits of this technology for the global LED lighting market:

• Significant reduction of development cost and time;
• Shortened time-to-market;
• Simplified supply chain;
• Functional, customized optics easily printed;
• Simple or complex optics produced “on-demand”;
• Easy in-process lens modifications;
• Free-form optics, virtually in any shape;
• No excessive start-up and tooling cost;
• One single manufacturing process;
• Integrated optical- and fixture design;
• New design opportunities.

Optical Prototypes and production series can be printed easily, on demand. Moreover, it will bring designers plenty of new opportunities in design and functionality, thanks to the unique digital way of designing and the opportunity to run “single-job” printing process. The creation and short term availability of optics has never been so easy and quick!

Finally, I am really sorry for this long post and taking so many of your time. But I trust this topic has your special interest, that’s why I am happy to explain this promising technologies’ backgrounds in more detail. Thanks for your interest and spending your time here.

If you are willing to experience more on this topic, I can recommend you a recent article in LED Professional Review (LPR), the leading worldwide authority for LED lighting technology information: http://bit.ly/GDtTMF (page 50-54).

How LED lighting optics and graphics seamlessly combine

Last time I wrote you, I promised to come up with some attractive results of both functional- and decorative optical designs, as well as some first design impressions of the new 3D printed optics website. Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with any decorative design patterns or applications yet. Nevertheless, I expect that the displayed, functional LED lighting optics below will impress you that much, that you will forgive me for now…

Printed LED optics: Fresnel lenses – micro optics – combined grapics

Right, they’re printed! All of them. LUXeXceL’s revolutionary 3D printing process will offer great value to the global LED lighting market. From now on, OEM lighting manufacturers and designers of LED lighting optics will generate significant cost reductions and time savings on the additive manufacturing of their LED lighting optics!

We’ll catch this and more of these revolutionary LED lighting optics in the next upcoming website. I am happy to share you the first design results of the homepage. It needs to be improved slightly, but I guess we’re almost there.

Printed LED Optics – Functional Lighting_Homepage

We allow users to switch easily from a ‘functional lighting’ (blue, technical) onto a ‘decorative lighting’ (orange, design full) environment on the right hand top. This is where technical and architectural lighting meets each other. Designs now can go ‘hand-in-hand’ with lens functionality, since it’s possible to foresee a functional LED lighting optic with any graphic elements, structure, typography, etc. The opposite is also true: decorative design lighting can now contain also functional optical structures and elements, e.g. integrated magnifiers.

Decorative, right. That’s exactly what you missed out in this post. But I promise you to come up with that information in one of my next posts.

How LED-lighting and sports perfectly match: night-time LED-snowboarder

For those who share my passion about LED lighting and snowboarding, check out this amazing video of a night-time snowboarder lighting up the last of the winter snow.

Fashion photographer and filmmaker Jacob Sutton swaps the studio for the slopes of Tignes in the Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, with a luminous after hours short starring pro snowboarder. The electrifying film sees the snowboarder light up the snow-covered French hills in a bespoke LED-enveloped suit courtesy of designer and electronics whizz John Spatcher.

A Jacob Sutton movie

Good design is obvious, great design is translucent

It’s less than a month ago since I wrote about the upcoming launch of the Luximpress website. Cool stuff to work with for graphimedia and digital artists, working with SFX and light, or different. Here’s another innovation coming up, based on the same “Printoptical Technology” of LUXeXceL: 3d printed optics for the lighting industry.

The future outlook for this application is great, since it offers great flexibility in terms of design and supply chain simplification. Moreover, it is possible to combine both functional structures and elements with any graphic textures, typograhy, etc. to be printed in one single 3D printing process, the so called “Optographics”. As a result of this, the company will not only provide functional LED lighting optics, but also decorative, high-impact lamp shades & shields.

A comprehensive website will be launched on short term, to foresee in the international market demand for LED lighting optics and provide LUXeXceL’s users a central platform to work from and foresee in their information demand.

Next time I write you, I will show some expressive results of both functional optics and decorative optical design patterns. That time, maybe some first design impressions of the website will be available.