Chroma #22: Back to our roots, smashing scammers, and a new vision for health

Oh, and a new product (pre-launch) announcement, too.

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Chroma founder newsletter, where I share my raw, unedited perspectives, without consideration for brand image or optimal marketing positioning. We have a new product I am fairly excited about that I did not think would be viable until rather recently. I’m going to share a bit about how I figured out how to build it, and contrast that with the approach taken by something that on the surface looks similar, which was built by someone whose day job is professionally committing financial fraud, scamming hapless individuals on a massive scale. Finally, I will share a bit about our new approach of slashing prices in perpetuity to impose a standard upon ourselves, even if there is no serious competitor that pushes us to do so — with this approach, we might just be able to get somewhere!

The moral imperative to crush scammers

I do not mince words. Several years ago, I pointed out how Joovv was blatantly lying to their customers about the power of their devices, and how the median customer interested in red light was bizarrely not smart enough to plug in a $10-15 power meter to figure this out. This really turned me off to the industry because how I am going to build and sell a more powerful product if people are too lazy to be discerning customers, and that is really what it is — intellectual laziness. It is simple to say people are retarded, and they are, but it is a sort of general apathy that is responsible for this, not a true handicap of raw intelligence. In fact, raw intelligence is very rarely the limiting factor, and amidst certain incentive structures, there appears to emerge what I like to call functional retardation.

When observing grifters of any variety, there is a temptation to ask, “does this person know that he is a grifter, that his works are a sham, meant to deceive and defraud, or is he simply a hapless fool, a true believer of his own nonsense?” I have asked this question myself many times, but as with science, engineering, or product development, asking good questions is of utmost importance and I no longer think this is one. If a tiger leaps at you and is in mid air, you do not ask if it is acting morally, or if of course there is nothing immoral because it is simply operating within its nature, you do not ask if it is “good” or “bad” to be eaten by a tiger, you simply shoot it then and there without making a fuss and move one with your life, perhaps a bit stirred from the adrenaline. It is similar to the common trope in zombie movies where the friend is bitten and they have not quite transformed yet and you have to go, “sorry, buddy, but I guess we have to shoot you in the head too now” and when they hesitate too much, others get bitten. Compassion for evil is cruelty to everyone.

The 8-9 year journey to the Chroma Skylight

Here are a couple early low-res images of the Chroma Skylight prototype we have been working on. We have a bunch of nicer photos that we are still putting together.

If you just want to go ahead pre-order it before learning more about it, here’s a link:

Like many nerds out there, I figured out a long time ago that it is far too dim in indoor environments, with even a brightly lit area with many lights or windows still only being on the order 1% as bright as direct sunlight, and closer to 0.1% in an indoor area that is not so brightly lit. I made a number of janky setups over the year. I had 5 5000k 18 watt Vivid+ Soraa bulbs connected to a WiFi controllable outlet as a light alarm clock, which was rather jarring. I had a number of lights at my desk shining down at me year before Chroma or the Sky Portal, and I had a bunch of halogen bulbs over the conference room table at my first startup, which annoyed half the team.

The original Sky Portal came from the reluctant acceptance that it is really quite impractical to try to compensate 100x over existing lighting solutions, or even 10x to get closer to sunlight. There were many companies replicating the shape or timing of a solar spectrum, but not the intensity, which is a bit like that video of some kids making a full size replica Bugatti out of mud in a developing country, which actually looks remarkable, but does not even match a Honda Civic on driving. The Sky Portal solved the intensity problem by deciding to only achieve that level of intensity directly on a single person in one small region of a room as a desk light. Moreover, early versions of Sky Portal had a pure light blue cyan channel to concentrate a limited amount of LED power into the wavelengths that have the strongest circadian response i.e. maximizing melanopic lux (the idea of 10,000 lux for SAD lights actually precedes the discovery of the cell in the human eye that has peak sensitivity to cyan so it is rather foolish to continue referencing lux, which relates to perceptual brightness and peaks in the middle of the green range, right in the center of the visible spectrum while cyan is about 25% of the entire visible spectrum left of that).

As early experiments when I was getting Chroma set up proved, you really just can’t get enough power if you are illuminating an entire space — or you could, but you would just use a ridiculous amount of LEDs, and have enough of a power draw that the electricity cost would become prohibitive.

The Sky Portal is a one-trick pony

A year and a half ago I decided to move out of my van and into a home as I wanted a space I could use as a workshop as I was thinking about getting back into some aerospace / advanced materials stuff. Like every home, the lighting was trash, and although I had Sky Portals, I was not always at my desk, and the existing lights were rather obnoxious. I tried screwing in some custom LED bulbs I had made into the existing sockets, but that did nothing because all the installed infrastructure is meant to be super underpowered, and from a business perspective, there is no way to transform the way buildings are constructed. Even new buildings that have higher LED power are incredibly lousy, in addition to the spectrum, now with glare, as small LED downlights are incredibly obnoxious since everywhere in an indoor space you will catch them in the corner of your eye.

I had a few round studio panel style lights, simply with ordinary white LEDs that blend together to form any color temperature within a wide range, and I pointed them upward at the ceiling. It turned out this was pretty much the best interim solution. In my living room I had a large panel on a 6 ft tall stand, and in my office I had a smaller panel on the back of my desk pointing up and back (alongside Sky Portals). This made my space way more pleasant, but it could not replace the Sky Portal because it was still vastly underpowered. It sort of took me out of the darkness, but it did not really bring me into the light. The larger panel in the living room was 200 watts, it had fans on it and was about 20 inches in diameter. Not enough!

Chroma: #21 We're Hiring & 2025 Product Roadmap

Hello, and welcome to the infrequent Chroma founder newsletter. If you’re new here, you might be interested in taking a look at our archives as I often dive into product concepts and technical details to a far greater degree than what we have on the website, or whatever the standard email drip marketing thing is, lol.

This is the unoptimized newsletter where I simply share whatever I want. I used to work on making new materials and manufacturing processes that are on the roadmap for some of the world’s most advanced weapons systems, and this has paid the bills since then since a bank will not print a fiat loan against “well, if you talk to the right people in the Pentagon (and I no longer even know who), they can give you a sense of just how much money will be going to that company as certain programs I don’t know about ramp up…” It looks like I’m finally going to be getting back into interesting stuff in aerospace & defense after being out for 6 years, but we’re gonna keep doing this Chroma thing as it’s finally picking up enough steam to be interesting in its own right.

Hiring:

We have been growing at breakneck speed as more people realize we make the best stuff, and need to go beyond 1.5 people to really manage the growth effectively. These are the two roles we envision, but if you are interested in helping in a different capacity, please feel free to suggest your own job description. Email matt [at] getchroma.co if you are interested. If you refer us to someone we hire full time, we will give you $1,500 in Chroma store credit. If you refer us to someone we hire part time, we will give you $300 in Chroma store credit. Both of these positions can have cash compensation based on qualifications, or part of compensation based on sales.

Startup Operations Generalist (actual title tbd):

• Can get stuff done across a wide range of tasks, without necessarily having a team of people available for each subtasks.

• Support supply chain, communicate with manufactures, help resolve issues in design or production. Utilize software and finance tools to accurately forecast demand and sure we maintain correct inventory levels.

• Product management: support the development of novel designs, understand the user experience, and how to communicate product capabilities to users, including websites and other brand digital assets. Work effectively with contractors.

• Support internal business operations, including building or utilizing software tools that allow us to make better decisions based on quantitative data. Knowledge of finance/accounting also useful.

• Take initiative and be self-directed rather than expecting someone else to manage your work — be willing to have meta-cognition about what needs to get done.

Biz Dev & B2B Sales Director (actual title tbd):

• Sell Chroma devices to corporations, employee wellness and performance

• Establish partnerships with high value tastemakers and real influencers, not just random instagram/youtube generic fitness influencers or models

• Build brand awareness and support PR efforts, including collaborate with ordained university researchers to have studies done with our products

• Engage with DoD, write & win proposals, and manage those programs

• Engage with nations states e.g. tell Japan & South Korea that we may be able to help fix their ultra-low-fertility problems

• Expand sales channels beyond DTC e.g. integrating into schools and hospitals in El Salvador.

• Expand beyond DTC for food/oils e.g. breaking into restaurant industry and managing distribution

• Coming up with and executing on non-obvious growth opportunities.

Our monstrous 2025 Product Roadmap:

• Chroma Ironforge Pro device: We figured out how to double the power of the Ironforge with some thermal & materials tweaks!

• Chroma “IronLaser” device (actual name TBD)… you might not want to hold out on this if comparing to the Ironforge Pro, it will be in the $6-10k range.

• Chroma “Sky Lamp” (actual name TBD): an entirely new approach to solve the indoor illumination problem once and for all, our first illumination device.

• Chroma Nightshades 2.0 Launch: it was actually a request from the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, relayed to us from one of his brothers, that inspired us to get this done.

• Chroma “Beautyforge” (actual name TBD): Sort of like a mini-Ironforge, but red focused — this will blow away every facemask on the market

• Ironforge, D-Light, and Lux Vital mini devices: lower-cost, more portable, but still far more powerful than our flashlight, which is also coming back

• Chroma Trinity: Ironforge + D-Light + Lux Vital 3 in 1 — everyone keeps asking us which one to get so we are making it easier to not have too choose

• Chroma Trinity Ultimate: Ironforge + D-Light + Lux Vital 3 in 1, but bigger

• Chroma Basic Bitch Bundle: People really want low cost products that look the same as everything else rather than purpose-built devices, so we are going to throw a bunch of those together and get them to you at a great price, and we’ll have a face mask in the bundle to. It will probably be under $500 and it will be perfect for recommending to friends.

• Promethean Portal Refinement: even more power, and adding enclosure

• LoLa Oil Macadamia + Coconut Oil Blend: new brand with oil product that is at a minimum, a much better option than avocado oil

• LoLa Oil Olive Oils: we will also have select varieties of olive oils that have particularly low levels of linoleic acid, the thing that makes seed oils harmful

• Chipiros Potato and Tortilla Chips: we will use coconut oil instead of beef tallow to have a healthier chip option than avocado or seed oil chips, while being able to offer less extravagant pricing because we actually want to eventually solve this problem in its totality, not just serve the top 1% of the 1%.

As these products are released, I will be writing newsletter posts explaining the thinking behind them, as well as sharing info on our Twitter as well as on our Instagram. This product list is a good reminder that when you buy red light therapy devices from anyone else, it achieves nothing beyond getting you that product in that moment. When you buy from Chroma, you are getting the product, and also shifting the world toward one that you might find is more to your liking. If enough people thought about things like this, we might find the world is in fact ductile.

Our 2025 Business/Strategy Roadmap:

#20 Chroma Team Growing, Recent Product Updates, and Roadmap

Good afternoon, if you are receiving this post you either signed up directly, or on our main website. I’m Michael, the founder of Chroma and use this newsletter to share my unedited thoughts, often going into technical minutiae or rambling about different ideas that make for rather lousy product marketing. I don’t touch any of the ads or marketing as I am a materials engineer and just like building the products I want, and until I met the guy who is running things now, things were just moving sideways, and I almost even shutdown the business at one point when sales were under a tenth of what they were now a year and a half ago. As I have always mentioned, if sales go up, my ability to build new products grows, as this business was bootstrapped from a time I was living in a van, and then moved into a 10x10’ office where I setup an electrical workbench to build the first prototypes (actually, I am technically still in that same van at the moment for the summer, mountain biking and rock climbing in British Columbia).

Anyway, we are now at the stage where our current team is getting overloaded with all the recent growth (as you may have noticed with the various backlogs we have had this year while trying to ramp up production… sorry about that, almost everything is back in stock and shipping now though). So we are looking to hire people to help manage and optimize that growth. Part time for now, but could become full time later.

The ideal candidate is a self-motivated and driven individual who excels in a dynamic environment where responsibilities are fluid and evolving. They should have strong technical proficiency and be capable of handling customer support inquiries. This role involves overseeing social media management, coordinating photo and video shoots, and supporting various marketing initiatives. Additionally, the candidate will manage the coordination, scheduling, and logistics for in-person events including conferences, ensuring smooth execution of all related tasks.

Send an email to matt@getchroma.co if you are interested, and please pass this along if you know other people who you think would be a good match.

In addition to needing help with Chroma, I am also working on launching an ingredient/cooking oil business where we could use 1 more person to help manage things as we approach launch. LoLa Oil is the company that will actually solve the seed oil problem because we are the only company that is interested in scalable solutions that transform the entire world. I will accept nothing less than being able to walk into a grocery store or restaurant anywhere in a country and knowing that all ingredients have <15% linoleic acid (bare minimum) without having to look at an ingredient label, look at an app and think about which menu items are acceptable, or have a conversation with a server where they are forced to inquire with the kitchen. The first product there will be consumer facing, and it’s a blend of 70% macadamia oil and 30% coconut oil in beautiful black glass bottles with 0 light transmission. Will be shipping in a matter of weeks…

Get notified of launch signing up with your email on the LoLa landing page

Follow LoLa oil on Twitter to get all the latest updates.

Chroma Product Updates: Better Electronics

I am thrilled to announce that we are finally using Gallium Nitride (GaN) power supplies across almost all of our devices! All the D-Lights, Lux Vitals, and Ironforges are shipping today with the new GaN power supplies, and the backordered Purple Wands that are just about ready to ship to us from our manufacturing partner are also now using GaN. The current Sky Portals are still running on traditional silicon power supplies.

What the heck is GaN and why does it matter?

Like silicon, GaN is a semiconductor that can be used in a power supply, a component that takes your alternating current (AC) from a wall plug and turns it into direct current (DC) at whatever voltage you need. Historically, everything has been silicon, and SiC and GaN have recently been growing at a tremendous rate now that it has become economically viable to manufacture. Different industries have been adapting it at different rates e.g. if you have noticed in recent years that your phone or laptop charger is quite a bit smaller and lighter, yet charges at a rather fast rate, it is probably using GaN. Overall, you get higher quality electricity, much lower thermal losses (more of the power goes into your device rather than being wasted, about 5-10% more). Here are a couple good articles that dive into the technical details and other factors.

https://epc-co.com/epc/gallium-nitride/what-is-gan

https://eepower.com/technical-articles/gan-vs-silicon-smackdown/

For LEDs, these were not readily available, and I was actually trying to get these last December, and then that was too early and caused some delays. We finally figured it out though, and I imagine it will be a while before anyone else switches over. These do cost more, but not too much more, and as production continues to grow, it seems possible that at some point silicon may stop being used entirely in power electronics. Other red light therapy companies don’t do this because they get generic panels that they slap their logo on, while we actually control more customized products where we are working directly across multiple lower tier component suppliers for quality control and other requirements. With the smaller power supplies, we have also resized cases on Lux Vital, D-Light, and Ironforge, along with a slight improvement on all the cables.

(Additionally, the new power supplies offer greatly improved AC-DC isolation, which means we now have the best in class “low non-native EMFs” for those who care about such things, as everyone else has their power supplies all together in a vented aluminum box, whereas our lights have a hermetically sealed aluminum enclosure and a long cable separating the LEDs and power supply.)

Game-changing new product inbound…

A few months ago we tweeted about the idea of making a new sort of floor lamp that would absolutely flood your home with an absurd amount of light…

(follow the Chroma Twitter account here)

Well, now we are getting an absolutely giant heatsink custom CNC machined as we work on our first production prototype. You know those giant UFO lamps in overhead warehouses? Pretty bright, right? Those are typically 200 watts. We are doing double that just in the white channel, and you will be able to run 100 watts in the amber channel at the same time! Turns out even the large oversized lamp bodies cannot handle it so we will need to have custom molds made to die-cast the aluminum heat sinks in production. This thing is going to be an absolute beast.

Moreover, I initially wanted to have a simple on/off switch for each channel, possibly with an intermediate mode, just to have absolutely no dimming, since dimming is almost always PWM (pulse width modulation), which means you rapidly turn the light on and off. LEDs can do this tens of thousands of times per second to be imperceptible in theory, unlike hideous fluorescent lights, but in practice, this might still have some biological effect. From a naive engineering perspective, PWM makes sense — it optimizes the longevity (which is very high in LEDs regardless), and ensures consistent color output.

When you dim an LED by driving it with less power, rather than full power for some fraction of the time, you actually get a slight shift in the spectrum… which is funny, because the spectrum of most LEDs suck, and on top of that, there is a biological perceptual effect where dimmer lights appear more blue shifted. This is the reason a not-that-bright 5000k color temperature bulb might feel too blue and cold indoors, but outdoor midday sunlight is around 5600k and you perceive it as warm!

#19 Chroma: My Biggest Blindspot on Sunlight, New Products, and Fixing Food

It has been an interesting past 6 months since the last post. As I have always promised, as sales go up, new products also go up (which no other light therapy company delivers on the way I do). With the help of various people, Chroma has finally reached a stage of stability and growth, without much of my time being required. This allows me to jump in here and there to push new product concepts without losing a bunch of time, and with the confidence they will actually be able to reach a wide range of customers. This growth has led to frequent product backorders since the business is bootstrapped and there is only so much cash to build out inventory, but this should be mostly resolved over the next few months.

Some promising new ventures in oil to finally end toxic seed oils and fix nutrition are also now underway (looking for people to help on this front), which is the next most important thing after light and heat/cold. I am also looking at possibly working with El Salvador in some of their health initiatives, which I will touch on as well.

New Chroma Products:

Promethean Portal: I have wanted this for a while and have written in previous posts about a whole body system. I realized we didn’t need to get to crazy and can just do it as a DIY Ikea style kit. Right now, the guy I’m working with didn’t take down all the Amazon URLs I sent him for extension cables, power strips, cable ties, and the wire rack, but he will get something together at some point, or you can just figure it out yourself. It’s just a bundle of 6 Ironforges and 6 Lux Vitals, and packs a bigger+better punch than a Novothor bed at about a tenth of the price. Anyone who buys a Novothor is a moron, such an embarrassment of a company, though I suppose most companies are. As I have previously shown, you can’t really match sunlight with most devices, but at least in terms of power, this is what you need to get there.

Lux Vital: This might be the most important product we have ever built and I am thrilled to be able to report that it feels amazing too. The Lux Vital represents a culmination of almost everything I have learned about light and I am proud to have this as our flagship device — there is absolutely nothing else on the market like it. I can guarantee you, even if the pricing seems high, you would be paying 100x more if any mainstream health institution caught up with us and offered it. You know what, screw it, I am going to tell you something that is probably really gonna piss off the people I work with (…I have a bad habit of doing that) — it doesn’t actually cost us any more to make this device than the Ironforge and we are applying value pricing. As I have repeatedly stated, I am not a marketing person — if you want commodity pricing, you will need to make the entire world understand the importance of light, as I am not interested in convincing people of anything.

I prefer aerospace, materials, and advanced engineering where the things I build exist in meaningful ways regardless of whether consumers believe in them or not. I like things where I can walk into a room and feel intellectually intimidated (e.g. when I walked into DARPA at age 23, or when I gave an ITAR presentation in Cocoa Beach 5 years ago). In fact, the only reason I even am finally getting around to putting together this newsletter is a roundabout plan to get funding, which I don’t need to go into, but on the topic of the extreme malinvestment from authoritarian, collectivist intermediation of free association and theft of private property impeding technological advanced, have you bought bitcoin yet? If you hold bitcoin, our prices go down, everything goes down eventually in terms of bitcoin, and it goes down a lot. A “successful” small business selling lights would be happy to impact 1% of the world, but in aerospace and materials, I can build things that will eventually be part of every single aircraft of the world. Dr. Jack Kruse keeps telling me the world is finally in a place where this sort of saturation may be achievable. Hmmm, now after writing all of this, I don’t really feel like explaining the product. If you check out the pinned tweet we have, you can see the biology underpinnings of this device. It triggers the pro-opiomelanocortin pathway i.e. main part of sunlight that triggers euphoria.

tl;dr Ironforge + UVA + cyan (two devices in middle are new Ironforges)

Why did it take me so long to figure this out? Because UVA generates nitric oxide, which near-IR already does, so I stopped looking. Having an answer, especially a correct one, can be a very dangerous thing if it gets you to stop looking. Answering questions is relatively easy, it is asking good questions that is hard. Though some people are remarkably bad at both and are incapable of understanding answers even when they are provided on a silver platter.

Sky Portal Mini: We finally have a small portable light that combines our high fidelity violet-phosphor pump white LEDs, with a 660nm red LED in the 2nd channel for a travel-friendly device. Excellent for re-setting your circadian rhythms when moving across time zones. You can also get a strap and wrap it around your body to hold it in place. It is nowhere near as powerful as the Ironforge, but for a highly localized need, if you have a convenient way to hold it there for 10 minutes, that will work pretty well. That’s the good — the bad is that the clips that were supposed to make it easy to clip to the top of your laptop somehow disappeared, but we will send those to you for free later on and we will get those in later batches, just may be a while. The other thing is we didn’t have time to find straps to hold in place so you will have to figure that out on your own.

Purple Wand: This product has been pretty slow to finally launch since I never really took it seriously. Originally called the TightLight, this is actually one of the most complex/customized products we have ever made. We had a custom mold machined for the outer polycarbonate casing since the thicker glass we previously went with could still break if dropped on concrete, and the thickness made the diameter larger than some customers wanted. This also the first product where we ever combined 4 separate LED chips within each individual SMD (each little square you see light coming out of): dual deep violets (405nm and 420nm, which stimulates the same opsin the Lux Vital was built around) and dual red wavelengths (660nm and 760nm). I would have just done 405+850, but then it would be very dim, whereas this gives you a really cool magenta hue.

Overall, this can work as a general purpose light device, and it actually has a bit more power than the Chromatorch (near IR flashlight), but it was originally designed as a dildo upon a customer request — the customer was actually more interested in prostate cancer risk, and when combined with a photosensitive dye, photo-immuno therapy is a highly promising, emerging oncology treatment. Alas, we are only in the wellness space, so we went in a slight different direction. Importantly, a dildo is a far more humorous product to build. It is even funnier when we found out there is actually a bunch of compelling data suggesting it is rather useful for women’s health in relation to fertility, post-pregnancy, etc. The funniest thing though, and something that could be straight out of a Douglas Adams book is that I am the one making it.

#18 Chroma: Crazy New Display Tech and next gen Sky Portals

The "we are so back" issue

Good afternoon, and thanks again for your sincere interest in the true physical nature underlying biological systems, and their impact on human health and performance. For a number of socio-psychological reasons we will not speculate on, this is bizarrely a topic of rather niche interest in our present epoch. I know I have promised I would be ignoring Chroma in previous issues, alluding to my present focus on my aerospace materials business, but I have unintentionally stumbled across a few things that are drawing me (briefly) back in to do some R&D and new product development. The nature of light and biology is that you pull on one string, and a bunch of things pop out, so although I hope to close the loop on everything quickly, the new concepts I am working with will have a somewhat broad impact across several of our product lines.

[Sidenote: the recent uptick in sales probably was part of the necessary (though not sufficient) conditions that led to where we are now — as I have implored my readers before, every sale to Chroma is at least 100x more impactful than sales anywhere else because it seems I might singlehandedly advance these fields on the product side more than the rest of the world combined (since 2016 when I pioneered the red-lens blue-blocking glasses with Carbonshade to move away from the ugly orange designs, without which, all the copycats that are available today might not exist).]

At this stage, I am not yet ready to announce all the details of what I am working on, but I am looking for feedback on a few specific aspects. To give you a bit of a teaser, here is the chart with the curve I have neglected to consider until now. ;) Also, note that the D-Light (safer UVB for vitamin D) is now heavily discounted.

I must give thanks to Dr. Jack Kruse and the recent podcast he did with Rick Rubin (famous music producer) and Dr. Andrew Huberman (Stanford doc with quite a bit of mainstream press). Dr. Kruse actually gave me a shout-out for the ColdBed Pillow we released a couple months ago when Dr. Huberman brought up the importance of a cold sleep environment, and how it would be nice to be able to do that without a complex WiFi based system. Dr. Kruse mentioned that he had told me to make a particular sort of light over a year ago (he had), but now it has finally clicked for me why it matters. But that is not the area where I am looking for feedback…

Sky Portal Re-Design in the Works

When the Sky Portal came out it was an incredible product, and it still is today, but it is not any better than it was when it launched. I have figured out how to improve the performance quite a bit on multiple fronts, but there is a question that still remains. The new version will likely come in a single variety to reduce confusion (now we have a cyan + white Sky Portal and a cyan + near IR Sky Portal). I have been reading some research papers on color theory, and it turns out, we do not actually have a color theory that correctly maps to reality. To be less abstract while we are talking about light and color, here is an image so you can visualize an RGB color space.

This triangle captures the gamut of colors that can be generated with combinations of three colors located in the corners of the triangle by mixing them in different proportions, with the center point of white representing a fairly even blend.

As you may already know, color is a perceptual phenomena, it is not actually describing any sort of physical reality. With 3 pixels, there is only one way to make a certain color, but when you add more, there are a number of different combinations of intensities at different wavelengths that will make the same color — just imagine two lines that go across different points on the outer edges, say 500nm and 600nm and 460nm and 540nm — it is clear that there is a point where those intersect so different ratios of those wavelengths can make the same exact same color with rather different wavelengths.

Now here’s the problem: you can apply this mathematical model of color theory and expect to get certain outcomes and for various things to behave a certain way, but they don’t. Thornton demonstrated several decades ago (before we even knew all these non-image-forming cells existed in the eye!) that a number of bizzare effects occur. For instance, he found that sometime taking a light that has 3 main spectral components and then removing one of them, which substantially drops the luminosity (whether you measure it by the radiant intensity, photopic luminosity, scotopic luminosity, or any other measure), yet the perceieved brightness substantially jumps up. Color theory says that should never happen. There are also various cases where the perceived colors based on how much each of the red, green, and blue cones of the eye are stimulated are not matching even though color theory says they should match — these effects are persistently found in a number of cases regardless of brightness, indicating that it is not rods that are responsible for the interference.

Anyway, neither color theorists or light designers typically consider the biological effects of the non-image-forming cells in the eyes, which now have well-established biological functions, though of course the pharmaceutical marketing department that sometimes is described by the misnomer of “healthcare & medical industry” neglects how important these effects are. At the research level, all of this is well established.

I am working on the next version of the Sky Portal based on all this information, and as might be clear by now, color has a degree of independence from the wavelengths, and it is the wavelengths that determine the biological response in the factors we care about such as sleep, wakefulness, mood, focus, eye health (or risk of fatigue/damage), and so on. Within the new design, I have flexibility on the color, but to simplify the product, this will not be user-adjustable. We will be dropping the fixation on having a light that excels at illumination from a videography/photography perspective (i.e dropping the ultra high fidelity index we currently have — my sense is not that many people care about this feature, though please hit reply and let me know if it is something that matters to you), which gives us a lot more design flexibility and certain advantages in removing certain spectral components that subtract rather than add value other than for their reflective fidelity. Rather than a chromatic cyan, we will have either a white or near-white appearance. As the RGB color space above shows, moving slightly away from the white point can easily bring us to a very lightly cyan/blue hue, or in another direction, into a very lightly magenta hue (we are not consider any sort of yellow/orange off-white), which brings us to the key question I want user input on (feel free to reply with any additional thoughts, questions, or ideas you have).

Lets Re-Engineer Every Computer Monitor?

Finally, to make the newsletter a bit more interesting, I want to share an idea I have been toying with for the past week, which is the possibility of adding a 4th sub-pixel to displays instead of relying on RGB. Eight years ago someone wrote a nice article arguing for a 4th sub-pixel to expand the color gamut, and this concept should make sense now: you only are able to produce the colos inside the space your pixels enclose.