LumoSpot

LumoSpot

How LumoSpot works

LumoSpot finds bars, cafes, and restaurants with outdoor seating that are in direct sunlight right now, or in the future.

Currently covering Amsterdam only - more cities are on the way.
Animation showing a venue's building shadows sweeping across it as the sun moves through the day

The Core Idea

LumoSpot calculates for every registered venue the shadows casted by their surroundings for each time of the day. For that, two things are combined: precise sun position and constructions around each venue. Together these let LumoSpot calculate whether a building nearby would cast a shadow over a specific seating area at a specific time of the day.

Search Radius

To know whether a venue is shaded, LumoSpot checks all buildings within 100m radius of that venue.

Weather, on top of shadows

Shadow geometry only answers "would the sun reach this spot if the sky were clear" - it says nothing about whether the sky actually is clear. To get this answer, LumoSpot layers a real weather forecast on top: cloud cover and rain refine a geometrically-sunny moment into sunny, partially sunny, cloudy, or rainy. A shaded venue stays shaded regardless of the forecast - weather can only refine an already-sunny result. The "Include weather" toggle lets you switch this refinement on or off entirely, falling back to pure shade geometry when it's off.

Sun exposure: remaining vs total

Remaining is how much qualifying sun a venue has left today, counted from right now, or whatever time you're viewing, until the end of the day. Total is the full amount for the whole day, regardless of what time it is. Both respect the "Include weather" toggle - with it on, only sunny/partly-cloudy time counts; with it off, any unshaded time counts, whether the forecast is clear or not.

Where the data comes from

Building heights and footprints come from an open dataset. Weather forecasts come from Open-Meteo. Venue locations and outdoor-seating information come from OpenStreetMap.