Have you ever wished for a big picture window or a skylight for an interior room in your house? Maybe your basement office or your first floor, middle of the house kitchen could use some livening up. You're in luck, The Sky Factory, sells fake skylights and fictitious windows to brighten up even the most central locations in your house. The system works by inserting pictures of the outdoors into window frames or skylight settings which are then backed by LED or fluorescent lighting to improve the aesthetics and livability of any location. You can even pull in outer space or underwater images to customize your living space.

The potential for these products is huge! Think of the retention rates when everyone in the office has a virtual corner office due to the luminous virtual windows. Adding a virtual skylight with a summery scene to your house could be the ticket to fighting Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) or claustrophobia. If so you might even be able to write pass the improvement off as a health benefit. Additionally these fake windows may be just the thing for your exhibitionist side! Now you can enjoy the feeling of relaxing or partaking in other activities wearing only your birthday suit directly in front of the window without the pesky threat of public indecency!

People have long used mirrors and other illusions to make a room appear bigger or brighter but this solution from The Sky Factory seems a little more elegant and high tech. It isn't as high tech or nerdy if you will, as my goal to procure several HD cameras and large LCD monitors to make a wall in my office reflect one of several locations worldwide but I think it will suffice. If you are simply looking for the sunlight benefits of a skylight without the fantastic view check out our previous coverage, how to light your home for free.

I have long been jealous of any home or office with a skylight. The thought of enjoying sunshine even when indoors and hard at work is giving me energy right now. Unfortunately most skylights are large windows, which can also be a thorn in the side of your heating bill. Thankfully there is a innovative solution which uses "a series of tubes" to deliver sunlight to several rooms.

This lighting system is made by Sun-Tek and come in several configurations depending how you want to use sunlight in your house. The Sun-Tek tubes can even be outfitted with an additional light so you don't need to install other fixtures to use the room at night. According to the Sun-Tek website the smallest tube they offer, 10 inches, is equivalent to two 100 watt light bulbs, sure to brighten up your home.

I'm not sure that any studies have linked sunshine to productivity, but I know sunshine bumps mine up. I would love to have a skylight in the shower in order to harness the sun's energy as part of my morning wake up routine. I don't know how far these tubes can carry the sunlight, but how cool would it be to light your basement man-cave with sunlight? You know: for those times you need to be sure just how many troops you have in Australia before you launch your quest for world domination.