YES, an excuse to talk about my favorite commercial light fixture. Someone who is still on Reddit can send this over lmao.
So, things you only think about if you are an electrical engineer or a lighting designer, daylighting is super important to people feeling comfortable in a space, but windows are horrible abominations of god especially in a commercial building.
What do you have against windows you may be asking, and the answer is that all buildings, especially commercial ones, share the same solar direction. In the northern hemisphere, this is the south, so the south side of a building typically becomes a bar brawl between all of the different disciplines on a project. The architect wants beautiful windows south, The mechanical engineer is okay with windows south if their air handler can be south to handle the heat loads from the sun. The electrical engineer would prefer the air handlers to the north because the sun is south which means the solar panels need a clean path south, and meanwhile, the poor structural engineer is just sobbing because windows are notorious for not supporting the weight of the building, i.e. the air handlers the mech wants above the windows to handle the heat streaming in from the windows cannot be supported by the windows, which means pillars, which means putting the architect in a headlock and suplexing them.
Or, or, or, hear me out, sunlight is pretty easy to fake. If you have an LED light fixture with a good enough CRI (Color Rendering Index, basically how well you can see different colors under a light fixture), you get all of the psychological benefits of the sun, without dealing with the painful engineering realities of dealing with the actual sun.
Enter something like Light Glass Lighting basically, this is a high CRI LED in a fixture that looks like a window, and is usually either synced to a photocell (sensor that detects the presense of light) outdoors, or, like the OP has figured out, sometimes it's basically just a time clock, it turns on when the sun rises, and turns off when the sun sets, and you'll notice, if you use basically just a time clock with these, they won't turn off when it rains. Which can be very disorienting for some people, there is a way to get these to turn off when it rains (again, easiest way is to sync to a photocell outside, but you can also do like API pulls to a weather service) but sometimes they don't, or in Ikea, I would guess they don't intentionally.
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