A brighter future? EU researchers harness the power of light
From the Sun, the Moon and flames, to ultra-modern semiconductors, human history is inherently bound to light. In this special edition of Futuris, weFrom the Sun, the Moon and flames, to ultra-modern semiconductors, human history is inherently bound to light. In this special edition of Futuris, we meet scientists and engineers who are making our futures brighter.
Eternal sunshineSunlight brings us comfort and safety. Wherever we are, we need to see the sky. It is in our nature. Rooms with no windows make us feel bad.
There are no windows in the radio surgery unit at the Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan, Italy – and it is raining outside – yet the room is lit up with a stunningly realistic illusion of sunlight.
“This is an enclosed, protected space, because of the radiation. And that can make the patients feel claustrophobic,” explained Piero Picozzi, neurosurgeon and head of the gamma knife unit at the hospital.
“This window creates an extremely realistic feeling of light – exactly like a real window. And that makes you feel better, calmer, when you enter the room.”
The optical system that hides behind the window is currently rather big, and it costs about the same as an average car.
A result of a European research project, it consumes just 300 watts of energy and has already won several industrial awards.
“How do we make a virtual window? This device is based on an LED projector that has all the spectral characteristics of sunlight and creates a narrow beam with realistic shadows,” said Paolo Di Trapani, Professor of Optics, University of Insubria; Founder and CEO of CoeLux; and the co-ordinator of the CoeLux and the DeepLite EU projects.
“Inside this device are all the optical systems that allow the observer to perceive the image of the sky with the infinitely distant Sun,” he continued.
“Within our project, we’re aiming to develop a sufficiently compact device that can be installed not just at home or in a hospital room, but even in a lift, a car, a ship’s cabin, a train, a plane – anywhere at all!”
Artists know that the Sun creates certain optical effects on surfaces. If we want the light to look natural, these effects need to be understood and reproduced. But how do we get the right colour?
Professor Di Trapani has managed to recreate the exact atmospheric process that makes our sky blue.
“The atmosphere contains air molecules that move, creating fluctuations in density at a extremely small scale of nanometers, a millionth of a millimetre,” explained Trapani.
“We’re reconstructing these fluctuations using nano-particles, a highly concentrated dispersion of tiny spheres with slightly higher index of refraction than that of water.”
The blue part of the spectrum scatters, turning water sky-blue during a demonstration. The reddish yellow passes through. That is the reason why we see our white Sun as yellow when looking through the atmosphere.
The same principle works in the window device, with the nano-particles fixed in transparent plastic instead of water.
“Our technology isn’t artificial lighting, it’s a window,” said Trapani, “a window that recreates the infinite space which man has been used to for hundreds of thousands years.”
The inventors see this as a new philosophy in indoor lighting.
Unlike lamps that create spots of light that remind us of surrounding darkness, these windows create a sunlit world outside – a world that can be turned off with the flick of a switch.
Flexible electronics: a brighter tomorrow?Inorganic LEDs have many advantages. Most notably, they are bright and efficient. But the organic light emitting diodes – OLEDs – have rather unique qualities that open up completely new possibilities.
At the Holst Centre in Eindhoven, in The Netherlands, industrial designers meet material scientists.
They’re exchanging ideas on how to use flexible OLEDs, new piezo-plastics and flexible electronic components in new touch-sensitive and light-producing devices.
“You can actually approach the problem from two sides. The material scientists tend to work bottom-up, from physics, to the mechanics, to how it works,” said Erik Tempelman, Associate Professor in Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology and co-ordinator of the Light Touch Matters project.
“The designers, they tend to think from the outside in, from why does it make sense for a user, why someone would enjoy using it.”
Child healthcare is one of the areas where smart flexible electronics can be particularly useful.
Lights in a table-cloth can interact with plates and dishes adding “magic” to hospital meals.
“We have been focusing on hospitalised kids. And we have been asking doctors, what is the biggest problem with recovering for a child when they’re hospitalised. For instance, we’ve been talking to cancer departments, and one of the biggest issues is lack of appetite – and that it is really important to eat when you want to recover,” explained Hanne-Louise Johannesen, a designer from Diffus Design.
“So the idea was to work with these eating situation and try to bring magic into that.”
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