Index
A hand holding the Sun Cube, which is casting a shadow on a window sill showing the time '1' in projected light.
Design

Sun Cube

A non-digital 'digital' sundial.

Daniel Voshart · · Updated

Light passes through tunnes in the cube to project the time. The first prototype was made from 59 stacked, laser-cut plates and contains no electronics.

The North American Sundial Society compared its design to the Japanese art of Chindōgu.[1] A half compliment because the art is known for being a mix of ingenuity and impracticality.

Time-lapse rendering showing 10am to 2pm.

The design is highly specific. To be accurate, its calculations must account for the Equation of Time and the location’s longitude. As a result, a single design works for about 15 days and within a latitudinal band of ~100 miles (+/- 50 miles). The first prototype was created specifically for my father’s birthday.

A grid showing the 59 individual laser-cut layers that make up the Sun Cube.
Layout of the 59 laser-cut segments. Square cutouts in middle section to save on cutting time.

The project was featured by Gizmodo[2] and The Daily Mail,[3] and was originally documented in Placeholder Magazine.[4]

The initial prototype was difficult to adapt to new locations and times of year. A brittle sequence of adjustments and boolean operations which took 30 minutes. The design was later revisited three years later and made fully parametric, cutting that time to just a few minutes.[5]

Scan from Placeholder Magazine, pages 32-33, showing the Sun Cube project title and an image of the cube in hand.Scan from Placeholder Magazine, pages 34-35, showing renderings and photos of the Sun Cube layers.
Spreads from Placeholder Magazine.
A brief demonstration of the sundial’s light projection.

  1. North American Sundial Society, “Digital Cube Beams Time”, NASS Compendium. ↩︎

  2. Adam Clark Estes, “This ‘Digital’ Sundial Tracks the Sun Through a Laser-Cut Cube”, Gizmodo, March 20, 2014. ↩︎

  3. Jonathan O’Callaghan, “A 21st century sundial: Laser-cut ‘digital’ clock uses Earth’s rotation to tell the time”, The Daily Mail, March 19, 2014. ↩︎

  4. Daniel Voshart, “The Opposite of Improvement”, Placeholder Magazine, 2014. Archived Link. ↩︎

  5. Daniel Voshart, “Revisiting a 2014 project…”, X, July 28, 2019. ↩︎