SensoryMetrics

Too bad he died in 1931.

I am forever frustrated by the lightbulb industry. Why doesn’t anyone focus on the quality and efficiency of artificial light. There’s so much potential for innovation. Incandescent tungsten lamps are energy hogging relics from the last century. Compact fluorescents are evil little dweebs that keep exploding and poisoning me with mercury.

My favourite is still halogen – which can run up to 35% more efficiently than standard incandescents. Unfortunately – they run hot and are more dificult to handle.

Where’s the innovation?

Over at the Tokyo Design Week 08 this month, designer Joonhuyn Kim presented a concept for a flat bulb. The claim is that it reduces glass material and packaging. As a bonus the bulb doesn’t roll around and presumably wouldn’t break as easily. Seems that this invention is too little too late though!

Meanwhile a New Jersey startup – Eden Park – has a plan for commercially-viable micro-plasma lamps.

The limitations of conventional macro-scale plasmas are inherent to their structure, and can only be solved by moving to microcavity plasma technology, or Microplasma for short. Microplasma lighting offers the following benefits, without compromising the advantages of standard plasma technology:

• Microcavity plasma technology combines a new electrode design and configuration. The electrodes are close together and allow a Mercury-free gas mixtures to be used while still achieving high efficiency.
• Close electrode spacing permits operation at near atmospheric pressure, which allows for new thin and flat form factors that previous generation technologies could not achieve
• Flat panel technology allows for high efficacy slim luminaires without the need of an external reflector to direct the light.

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