Faux skylights and windows
The Sky Factory deals in fake skylights and windows. Their SkyCeilings and Luminous Virtual Windows are photos of the outside that fit into standard ceiling or window grid systems. Fluorescent and LED backlighting is also available. It's like having a piece of Vegas in your own home! Seen here is a backlit Luminous SkyCeiling installed in a medical procedure room.Link
Previously on BB Gadgets:
• Sky Factory SkyCeilings Link
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For years I worked in an cubicle farm and I could have sworn that the section next to ours had an escalator that went to the first floor.
I have no idea why I thought that - we were on the 27th floor. That would have been a hell of an escalator.
As seen in the Ministry of Magic!
this is perfect for when the zombies come and we all have to hole up underground.
I think it's a nice picture, but unless it moves, I hardly think it's worth it.
I talked to these guys the other day. They're experimenting with fully animated ones using arrays of LCD panels. YES I WANT THAT IN MY ROOM
YES OVER MY BED
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/04/25/sky-factory-skyceili.html
I use a TV in our home in a similar way. I use a computer to run a graphics program called Soft Skys--clouds and sky. It's a nice big "window" and can give the room a nice feel.
I would much rather see this than the standard magazine pic thumbtacked to the ceiling in an OB-GYN exam room....
I really like this!
If the product is a good as seen in the photo, it certainly creates a wonderful and convincing illusion.
Great job. Thanks for the post.
Joel:
Agreed: Until someone pwns the box.
Step 1: Wake Up
Step 2: HELL-LO
Step 3: ????
Step 4: SCARRED FOR LIFE.
Joel, sounds like the "window" in Back To The Future 2..
Yup they'll even do a custom Star Wars skylight room for you too. No word on if they'll supply the battle overhead though.
http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2008/04/30/star-wars-skyceiling/
Man, nature photographs in light boxes - like you see in wall advertisements in the airport, or like some of Jeff Wall's stuff - fill me with a sense of well-being, and I'm not sure why. Sometimes more than looking at actual nature. It's like hyper-real nature.
I hear ya, Sister.
I work as an environmental graphics designer doing mostly Hospitals and Medical Office Building and these things are all the rage in new buildings or remodel (especially Cancer Centers). At least on the West Cost of the US. I was just working on one for a project in LA where the client wanted the lighting to change with the passing of the day ending up in stars (using a fiber optic system to make it work). Would have been really cool except when it was all said and done they couldn't swallow the price tag.
...They basically ended up with something like this with lights on a dimmer switch.
Anyway. All hail 3M. They are the primary supplier for the materials for these.
I think I'll stick with real live hickory trees and a bird feeder outside my window. Grumble, grumble, Fake windows... hell in a handbasket, etc. *shuffles off to read Last Child in the Woods and Biophilia
Slowglass!
I like the ones of Antelope Canyon. But I'd rather just move to someplace like Moab.
ah so Sister,you like Jeff's stuff? I had the fortune to attend his studio once.
I remember slow glass too -or foremember....
You've been sparsely present today, Takuan no nii-san.
am I not always with you?
You mean the larva that's slowly eating my spleen?
On another note....
I work in a hospital, and we have something like this in the ceiling over our CT scanner—a beautiful view of a canopy of autumn leaves.
One day, I brought a trauma patient into CT. He'd been working in a cherrypicker that had plunged down a ravine, and he'd been thrown into the branches of a nearby tree and been stranded there, injured, for hours.
We moved him over to the CT scanner, he looked up at the ceiling, and said "You know, I'm sure you guys thought you knew what you were doing when you put that up there, but I'd really rather not see that right now...."
True story.
Takuan, I'm so jealous. I saw the show of his stuff at the SFMOMA a few months ago (the Joseph Cornell show was there at the same time, it was like Disneyland for aesthetic geeks) and I wanted to move into the museum.
My office is in a building with no windows; I'd love something like this.
This sounds really cool but I do feel real windows would be better.
Reminds me of the suicide parlor in "Soylent Green".
Many radiation treatment centers use these- I saw one today, as a matter of fact. The treatment rooms are (naturally, as they are lined with 12" lead) windowless, dark (so setup lasers can be seen by therapists), and filled with machines that are likely intimidating when pointed directly at you (the patient).
If anyone's interested, the machine pictured is a CyberKnife: Basically, an industrial robot (though tolerances are changed significantly) with a 6MV linear accelerator on the head which can deliver stereotactic radiation treatments, which are designed to deliver high doses of radiation in very few fractions.
within a microsecond of user customization it will be used for porn as faux mirror rather than a faux skylight