First there was light, next there were organisms that drew energy from it, then there were animals that sensed elements of their environments through fluctuations in it.
Now as this week's Crowd-Fueled Kickstarter Thursday shows, there are campaigns using it to promote wellness and art in the modern age.
Light doesn't drive the seasons, but let's face it, there would be none without it. This week, we take a look at promising campaigns that are innovating with light technologies and others that have drawn pledges at the speed of photons.
The Sunn Light
The team behind this week's first featured campaign wants consumers to imagine what it would be like to have a piece of the sun in living spaces, with residents waking up or winding down to the variable glow of the Sunn Light. The LED light fixture emits colors and levels of lights as it simulates the sunlight outside.
"Sunn automatically mimics what's going on outside -- down to the minute -- to help your body tune in to rhythms found in nature," states the campaign. "Sunn fills an entire room with high-quality, diffuse light and transforms it into a vibrant and healthy space."
There are at least 423 people who want to want to say goodbye to the end of a long day with the glow of an artificial sunset filling their living rooms and bedrooms. Those 423 backers have pledged more than $150,000 to the campaign, which has a goal of $50,000, and there's still another day left before the sun sets on this fundraiser.
The Light Bandit
This next campaign seeks to steal drops of sunlight, pipe the lifted light into compatible light fixtures and then wring out the photons into living spaces in need of natural ambiance.
The Light Bandit's compatible light fixtures "scatter the concentrated sunlight." The fixtures are safe to the touch, harmless to the eyes and require no power source besides the sun, according to the campaign.
"The Light Bandit improves on natural sunlight by giving you control over where and how the sun illuminates your home," states the campaign. The engineers at Think Tekk designed the collector to use a highly reflective Fresnel mirror to focus sunlight on a fixed absorber.
The optimal distance for light to be transmitted from the collector is up to 30 feet, the campaign says, as the plastic optical fibers that transmit the sunlight lose about 1 percent of the light for every foot they travel. The Light Bandit only works in the daytime with sunlight, but they may consider tracking moonlight for some eerie nighttime mood lighting.
So far, 70 people have ponied up $10,179 of the requested $200,000 goal, and eight days remain on the campaign.
The Kinetic
It aims to take gloving to another level, using accelerometers to interpret the wearer's movement into changes in color and strobes of light from the gloves. Oh, "gloving" is an emerging art form in which dancers wear LED-equipped gloves to put on light shows in dark venues. It also offers color-coded programming and a Playback mode to help you remember the colors you chose.
"Gloving is different things for different people, but at its heart, gloving is an art form," states The Kinetic's campaign. "Gloving mixes technology and art; dance and electronics. We aim to make that boundary seamless."
The Kinetic has attracted 258 backers who have pledged double the campaign goal of $20,000. There's still over four weeks left in the Kinetic's campaign, but the light-emitting, motion-sensing gloving chips have earned the capital needed to launch what the campaign calls "the funnest chip on the market."
If this week's Crowd-Fueled Kickstarter was too light -- yes, that was bad - click here to check out last week's roundup to find out about campaigns that promise a more secure digital life.
