lincolnquirk

Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office. This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea, and Raemon wrote a playbook in 2018 for how to do it yourself. Now I and at least two other friends are trying to build something similar, and I suspect there's a bigger-than-it-looks market opportunity here because it's one of those things that a lot of people would probably want, if they knew it existed and could experience it. And it's only recently become cheap enough to execute well. Coelux makes a high-end artificial skylight which certainly looks awesome, but it costs upwards of $30k and also takes a lot of headroom in the ceiling. Can we do better for cheaper? Brightness from first principles First let's clear up some definitions: * Watts is a measure of power consumption, not brightness. * "Watt equivalent" brightness is usually listed for LED bulbs, at least for the standard household bulb form factor. You should generally ignore this (instead, just look at the lumens rating), because it is confusing. Normally "watt equivalent" is computed by dividing lumens by 15 or so. (bulb manufacturers like to make LED bulbs that are easy to compare, by having similar brightness to the incandescents they replace, hence "watt equivalent") * Lumens output is a measurement of an individual bulb, but says nothing about the distribution of those rays of light. For that you want to be doing math to estimate lux. * "Lux", or "luminous flux", is the measurement of how bright light is on a certain surface (such as a wall or your face). Lux is measured in lumens per square meter. Usually, your end goal when designing lighting is to create a certain amount of lux. * Direct sunlight shines 100k lux (source for these on Wikipedia) * Full daylight (indirect) is more than 10k lux * An overcast day or bright TV studio lig