Frog buildings have a certain intangible quality about them. They feel brighter than most buildings, roomier, fresher. Much of this is derived from the extensive use of natural light in our buildings – which makes sense: naturally lit spaces have been proven to have a positive effect on people. It lifts the mood and makes people smarter. Literally. Students learn 20% faster when taught in spaces illuminated by natural light. Shoppers tend to spend 40% more. Employees have fewer missed days, perform better, and are retained longer.

What’s more, making use of natural light has a direct impact on the bottom line: artificial lighting accounts for nearly 20% of commercial building’s electrical expenditure. Which means that most businesses pay more to achieve less.  

Brighter Buildings: achieve more, pay less.

Our lighting visualization software enables accurate and physically valid lighting and daylighting simulations that are not achievable using typical analysis methods. Made up of over 50 sub-programs that incorporate stochastic, raytracing methods, our programs more accurately simulates how light behaves in real life. We understand that ambient light levels (illumination) are a result of how light diffuses, reflects and refracts through and off of various surfaces in a room; qualities that make light distribution hard to predict. The program uses exact material specifications for a particular project (such as color, surface texture and reflectivity), orientation, and building geometry to generate a snapshot of illumination levels for any day, time and location in the room. This process can easily be repeated for any climate and geography using typical mean year (TMY) weather data to optimize the location, size and transparency of the building’s apertures. 

The ultimate goal of this analysis is to achieve Daylight Autonomy (DA), which is conceptually defined as the percentage of time of the working hours over a year at which daylight can provide a useful illuminance for a given point in space resulting in the electrical lighting being dimmed or turned off. Based on both research and experience shared by professional lighting designers, we’ve defined useful illuminance as a minimum of 30fc on a work plane (such as a desk or teaching wall). This methodology can also estimate glare conditions by establishing the maximum light level that can be tolerated at 10 times the minimum, or 300fc. A successful building is optimized when the useful daylight illuminance (UDI) is between 30fc and 300fc at the percentage of time established by the client set specification.

The result? A beautifully lit, bright environment. One that saves money and increases productivity. Naturally.