Products + Technology

The Lumy Awards is a new industry awards program dedicated exclusively to honoring exceptional innovation, design, and distinction in lighting products. Launched last week, the Lumy Awards aims to fill a growing gap in the lighting industry by recognizing the products themselves—such as luminaires, controls, lamps, and components—rather than architectural lighting design or projects. The [...]

  Wireless Electricity: Nikola Tesla’s Century-old Dream Coming to Life  The concept of wireless electricity—a vision championed by Nikola Tesla in 1901—is on the brink of transforming modern energy distribution. Tesla’s early ideas involved transmitting electricity through the Earth’s ionosphere. Although those ambitions never materialized, they inspired generations of researchers. The field saw pivotal breakthroughs [...]

  Toroidal propellers have potential to impact the fan, ceiling fan, wind turbine, and aerospace industries. They have made the most progress in the marine propulsion market, to-date. Sharrow Engineering, through its marine division Sharrow Marine, is undergoing major expansion in 2025 after introducing new versions of its proprietary propeller in 2024. This expansion includes [...]

  Cornell University researchers have pioneered a groundbreaking method to watermark videos using light, addressing the urgent problem of video manipulation in an era dominated by generative artificial intelligence and rapidly spreading misinformation. Their innovation, named “Noise-Coded Illumination for Forensic and Photometric Video,” involves embedding a secret, unique code directly into the light emitted by [...]

  Sengled, once a prominent name in smart lighting, is facing significant turmoil, as of Summer, 2025: Critical outages: Starting in June and recurring through July, Sengled’s Wi-Fi-enabled smart bulbs and app suffered major outages, leaving users unable to control their lights via the Sengled app, Alexa, or Google Home. Complaints flooded forums as users [...]

  Researchers have developed a low-cost visual microphone that listens using light rather than sound, advancing remote audio capture by turning tiny surface vibrations into audible signals. This innovation applies single-pixel imaging to sound detection, marking the first time the technique has been used for this purpose. Unlike traditional microphones, which rely on mechanical diaphragms [...]

  Researchers from the University of St Andrews and the University of Cambridge have achieved a breakthrough in wireless optical communications by using OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes)—commonly found in smartphone screens and televisions—as fast, long-distance transmitters for visible light communication (VLC), also known as Li-Fi. VLC uses light waves rather than radio frequencies to send [...]

I was impressed to read about the lengths to which display makers were going to improve eye comfort for users. Let’s look at the new TCL NXTPAPER 11 Plus 11” tablet, as an example. First introduced in 2020, NXTPAPER is a hardware and software combination designed to manage blue light output from devices “while maintaining excellent visual [...]

By Adam Reeder, President at LightArt & VP at 3form When designers think about lighting, the first question they typically ask themselves is, “How does it look?” and, “How does it illuminate the space”? For much of my career, cleanability was a footnote in lighting conversations and typically an afterthought, not something designers sought out [...]