What is Automotive Interior Lighting and How Does it Work?

The driver uses displays and indicators to obtain information, which could be standard dashboard instrumentation information or more complex information from a navigation system, a menu-driven display, or a multimedia device. For display and indicator lighting, the key metrics are color, luminance, and luminance uniformity.

Interior Illumination systems provide light to enable the driver or passengers to see something else. These systems include dome lights, mirror lights to illuminate a face, map and reading lamps, storage lights, and so on. For Illumination systems, the key metrics are the geometry of the illuminated area, illuminance levels, and uniformity. Color can also a factor, both for visibility issues and for custom "mood" lighting.

The primary purposes of accent lighting is to provide styling cues, create a desired ambience and to locate various controls, such as power window controls and radio knobs, and other features, such as cup holders and charging ports, in a darkened cabin. Accent lighting generally has a much lower intensity than interior illumination fixtures since the goal is not to illuminate other objects in the cabin, but just to be visible itself. The main design concerns with this type of lighting are color, visual uniformity, and appropriate light levels.

Lighting a Room, Simplified

Any experienced designer will tell you that lighting is an essential ingredient when you’re decorating a room — not the afterthought that many of us consider it.

If you’re tempted to spend more of your time picking out furnishings or puzzling over layouts, remember that lighting can completely transform a space — not just by brightening dark corners, but by affecting your emotions.

“Light is a powerful thing,” said Theo Richardson, the director of development at Rich Brilliant Willing, the Brooklyn-based design studio known for its striking LED fixtures, which he founded with Charles Brill and Alexander Williams. “The right light lifts the mood, inspires productivity and motivates us. At home, light enlivens the little things — our morning routines, or the moments we spend with friends.”

14 Types of Indoor Lighting You Should Know About

You might think that your home’s lighting setup is mostly inflexible, that you can’t add much besides a few lamps to the fixtures that come with your home. As the 14 types listed here indicate, this assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. Read on to see how changing up your home’s lighting setup isn’t just easy, but fun and creative!

What is indoor lighting?

These fixtures are exactly what you think they are: Any lamp, pendant, or fixture used to illuminate your home’s interiors. They are typically made not just to brighten your space, but to add decor and overall enhance your current furniture setup. This includes the fixtures already installed in your home when you move in and any lamps or other fixtures you add. Importantly, indoor fixtures are often not waterproof and dustproof—important items for outdoor fixtures to have—so they should only be used inside at all times.

14 types of indoor lighting

Mix and match any of the below types of indoor fixtures to elevate your surroundings and set the mood, no matter the occasion:

1. Recessed fixtures

Recessed fixtures are any indoor lights fully contained inside your walls, ceiling, or floors. While that wording might sound fancy or complex, it’s basically just the interior design way of describing the fixtures that lay flush with your ceiling or walls. On the other hand, fixtures that protrude from your walls, floors, or ceiling are not recessed.

2. Track lighting

Your home’s pre-installed fixtures aren’t the only way you can direct light from your ceiling toward your floors. Track lights mount to and protrude from your ceiling. They point directly downward, so you can use them to illuminate hallways or the very center of a room. They have a high-class and artistic feel, but you might need an electrician to help you properly install them.

3. Pendants

Pendants come in a wide range of colors and styles that seamlessly blend into any home decor. You can easily set up pendants by yourself (but having some friends help never hurts). Just attach some sturdy hooks to your ceiling, then run your pendant’s wire through your hooks and along walls and floors while keeping it out of view. Pendants are swanky like their track lighting counterparts, but they can be a lot easier to set up than track lights. So too can another type of indoor light often wrongly seen as challenging to install...

4. Wall sconces

Wall sconces extend from your wall to illuminate your hallways and side tables, so you might think that using them requires an electrician installing wiring behind your walls. But that isn’t always the case! Plug-in wall sconces solve this problem – just keep the wire well-hidden, plug it in, and securely mount your sconces. Chances are that nobody other than you will know that you’ve gone the plug-in route instead of making a more permanent investment.

5. Ceiling lighting

Speaking of permanent, if you need a consistent, reliable foundation for your indoor lighting design, install ceiling fixtures. We don’t mean just standard recessed ceiling fixtures – we mean chandeliers, pendants that you mount close to your ceiling, and even low-hanging lights. Without the much-needed lighting cornerstone that ceiling lights can provide, your indoor space, whether your living room, bedroom, or kitchen, might be imperfectly lit.

6. Ambient lighting

If you use fixtures on (or in!) your ceiling to build your well-lit foundation as we just described, then you’re using what’s called ambient lighting. This is one of the three major types of indoor lighting, and many fixtures and styles fall under it. For example, a floor lamp powerful enough to brighten your whole room is ambient lighting. It creates a base layer of soft or bright white, off-white, or yellow hues for your room that you can build on with the other two major types of fixtures: task lighting and accent lighting.

7. Task lighting

Task lamps and other similar fixtures are what you install or set up to use for specific activities. Your desk lamp, bedside reading lamp, and even the light over your sink that you turn on to wash dishes are all considered task lights. You’ll usually set them up on side tables or directly above chairs or desks, so you can get really creative with their look, brightness, and placement – just as you can with accent fixtures.

8. Accent lighting

Need a quick way to make your favorite furniture piece or painting appear brighter and stand out more? You’re looking for accent lighting. Install a fixture directly above a dazzling loveseat or right under a stunning portrait to properly illuminate it and draw attention to it. With accent lighting, you can emphasize all your room’s best traits!

9. LED

This type of indoor lighting is best known as an energy-efficient alternative to the light bulbs that dominated the 20th century. LEDs diffract in all directions and bathe your room in a soft hue. They’re long-lasting, staying lit for thousands of hours. Some models support color-changing abilities through a remote or an app, too. You’ll find LED lights in many forms, including standard bulbs and decorative and accent fixtures like strip lights and string lights.

10. Laser lighting

Lasers are electrical filaments used to generate light found across a wide array of fixture types. Since lasers travel along a narrow beam instead of diffracting in all directions, it doesn’t lose brightness and focus over distance. Its narrow path also makes diffracting one beam into thousands of smaller beams super easy, which is why, here at BlissLights, our laser projectors often have that widely sought, lovely starry sky effect (which we’ll discuss more soon).

BlissBulb Laser LightBulb $14.99 Transforming your world is as easy as changing a lightbulb. Shop Now arrow_forward

11. Portable lighting

These portable fixtures can be brought with you from room to room, and even to other’s homes or to work. They’re simple to plug in and install, either by plugging in to a regular outlet or connecting to a USB. Their lightweight and compact design also make them a cinch to pack up and take with you. Here at BlissLights, our StarPort Laser USB is the perfect example of a portable light– this tiny fixture plugs into your portable battery, charging base, or laptop for easy movement between rooms, but its light brings full-size power!

StarPort USB Light $19.99 One tiny light. Thousands of stars! Shop Now arrow_forward

12. Plug-in lighting

Plug-in lighting runs the gamut from classic daytime fixtures to special lasers. Your favorite floor lamp is a plug-in, and so are laser projectors. With our Ark Ambient Aurora Light, for example, all you need to do is connect it to an outlet and set your projector down wherever you want. Beautiful blue and green hues will soon after flood your room in a transportive, relaxing wave cloud-like nebula.

ARK Aurora Light $69.99 $49.99 Transcend reality with a moving abstract aurora. Shop Now arrow_forward

13. Star lighting

Simulate a night under the stars with lasers! Star lighting fully illuminates your room in red, blue, or green while projecting stars throughout your space. Even the most striking accent fixtures can’t quite make your room look like what you see at midnight from a clear field with no streetlights – use our BlissBulb for that instead. The shapes it casts might be enjoyably unorthodox, but it screws into standard fixtures like any old bulb, making a beautiful view supremely easy.

14. Galaxy and nebula cloud fixtures

Stars are just the start – you can project whole galaxies indoors! Lie back and relax as a calming swirl of nebula clouds with starry speckles engulfs your room. You can achieve this tranquility with our SkyLite Laser Galaxy Projector, which is a huge hit on TikTok. Anyone can get in on this new decor sensation – yes, that includes you!

Sky Lite Galaxy Projector $59.99 $49.99 Shine a galaxy of moving stars and a blue nebula cloud. Shop Now arrow_forward

Go beyond indoor lighting basics with BlissLights

At BlissLights, our portable, plug-in, star, galaxy, and nebula projectors can transform your home from a space with the bare essential fixtures to an immersive, lovely interior design experience. Lounge out in blues and greens, bring striking reds with you from room to room, or take a trip to outer space faster than you can say “blastoff.” Browse our shop to find your indoor lighting.