This Futuristic Smart Glass Has TikTok Impressed
Smart glass has been around since the early 2000s and has found its way into building and home construction and the automotive industry as Gauzy notes. The concept even popped up in the sci-fi classic Blade Runner as far back as 1982. That doesn't mean, however, that everyone knows it exists or fails to be impressed by it when they see it work for themselves. A new TikTok video from @Future_Explored has now been viewed over 1.2 million times, illustrating just how mesmerizing the technology can be. As a technology that has been in development for around two decades, it has of course evolved and become more sophisticated over time.
There are also a number of different iterations of smart glass technology but the easiest way to think of it is as an active glass that can be made to change color to regulate the amount of light and even heat that can pass through it. To achieve this ability to actively change its transparency or translucency, smart glass makers can choose from technologies including electrochromic, photochromic, thermochromic, suspended-particle, micro-blind or polymer-dispersed liquid crystals. These technologies can be either built into the glass, or as in the TikTok video, applied as an aftermarket film layer to existing glass making retrofitting it a snap.
Ingenious technology with many applications
The technology used in the smart glass film shown in the TikTok video is the suspended-particle type, also known as SPD. As the Detroit Free Press explains, the suspended-particle smart glass works by particles that respond to an electric current that passes through the film. When in transparent mode, like regular glass, the particles remain unaligned allowing the light to pass through. However, when a current passes through the film, the particles line up to reduce the amount of light that can pass through the film. It is certainly ingenious and is becoming more affordable and widely applied as the technology matures and more and more people become aware of it.
As the TikTok video highlights, the application of smart glass technology is designed to perform any number of different functions. This can include simply being able to make a meeting room transparent to turning it opaque for privacy when required. Some smart glass films can even incorporate switchable artwork to make the space more welcoming. Smart glass can be used to help control temperatures in smart homes by automatically reacting to light and heat and automatically dimming. This can save a lot on energy costs. Other smart film technologies used in homes or cars can be dimmed on demand to help block unwanted sun blinding you at sundown, or stop unwanted light from coming through a car sunroof.