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A comment on How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain. Parent comment

Re:How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain by BenoitEssiambre on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @09:42PM (#42800062)
What I'm trying to achieve is lighting a bit like in these "Artificial Skylight" concepts: https://architizer.com/blog/practice/materials/let-there-be-... They claim their technology is about "Rayleigh scattering" but I think that's mostly marketing mumbo jumbo. Sure that might add a bit of diffuse blue but their main secret, I would bet, is parallel rays which explains why their fixtures require so much space above the ceiling to get around conservation of etendue. The effect of parallel rays and sharp shadows are definitely represented in their example pictures.
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Re:How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain by vvladymyrov on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @10:24PM (#42800373)
I’ve installed 4 similar skylight lamps to the basement. Bought them on Amazon for 700$ each (had to replace 1 because it had uneven light). They make basement light much closer to ourdoor light and made basement very cozy and comfortable. I had depth space in the ceiling, but width of the lamp didn’t fit between joists - so could not push lamp all the way at the ceiling level. End up building nice boxing around lamp. So it was medium complexity project with great result.
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Re:How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain by bmelton on Thursday January 23, 2025 @08:47AM (#42803945)
I'd wager they're pretty good. If you can leverage a parabolic reflector at a light's focal length, you can get them to collimate in a way that approximates the sun by appearing to be pinned near-infinitely far away. The reflector is generally what takes up the space, but it's necessary(ish) -- you could approximate the effect by using a fresnel lens at the light's focal length, but it yields a smaller light with rainbowing effects.

[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw&t=843s) does a good job of showing how to make your own, as well as illustrating how good the effect is, while also demonstrating why space-hog implementations are likely to yield good results and slimmer ones not.

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Re:How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain by nothrabannosir on Thursday January 23, 2025 @12:46PM (#42806135)
Reminds me of this old dyi video about using decommissioned led monitors to create light boxes with parallel rays to emulate sunlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4
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