Imagine if you could effectively bottle up a particularly beautiful sunset, clear winter’s morning or sunny summer’s day, and instantly recreate it from the comfort of your living room.
That’s the idea driving Italian design studio Olive Creative Lab, which recently presented a demo of its new “Sun Memories” lamp as part of the U.K.’s London Design Festival.
Sun Memories is an innovative illumination system that’s designed to record the changing light throughout the day, and then reproduce it using a powerful RGB LED lamp — right down to specific color temperature and light intensity.
“The idea started when one of my colleagues moved to London for a year and a half, and found that she really missed the Italian sun,” designer Marco Signoretto told Digital Trends. “As designers, lighting is something we feel very strongly about. Often people just think about illuminating a room, but for many lighting has a profound impact on how they live. Lighting triggers memories.”
The lamp itself is finished to a high standard, with a minimalist Marquinia marble and black anodized aluminium support, together with a light diffuser plate that helps draw the eye to the light changes. It’s not the only piece of kit involved, though.
“The system is composed of three different parts,” Signoretto continued. “There’s a wearable device with a built-in sensor able to store color information about the sunlight. Then there’s also a mobile app, which lets you download those recordings onto a smartphone, and finally there’s the lamp itself — which lets you play them back.”
The app even makes it possible to create personalized “sunlight recordings playlists” or share individual “suns” with your buddies.
Sadly, you can put your wallet away for now, however, because the Sun Memories lamp is still a work in progress — although there are plans to launch it as a product in the near future.
“At the moment, we’ve got the first prototypes, but we need to develop both the software and the hardware further,” Signoretto said. “We hope to have a product ready for December, but there’s still a lot of work to do to make sure this is something that will live up to what people are hoping for.”
Olive’s realistic light ambitions aren’t just limited to lamps, either. “We don’t want to stop there,” he said. “Eventually we want to consider offering something similar for all the lights in your home.”
