More than half of the light an OLED produces can become trapped within its glass substrate due to the different indexes of refraction in the OLED structure, the glass, and the air. A great deal of work in the OLED lighting industry is focused on finding ways to free this trapped light. While the goal is to find methods that add only minimal thickness to the panel, in the lab researchers often place a large glass hemisphere against an OLED panel as a simple way to extract the trapped light for testing.
- Design Brief -
Almost all of my other work at UDC revolved around celebrating unique characteristics of OLED lighting panels: thinness, lightness, flexibility, or transparency. This would be a chance to do something different, design a lamp using the light-extraction hemisphere as inspiration.
