A thin gold layer could be the secret to glasses that don't fog

https://gizmodo.com/glasses-fog-anti-no-fog-without-spray-heating-gold-laye-1849887511

by thunderbong • 4 years ago

99 89 4 years ago

gizmodo.com

jjtheblunt3• 4 years ago

X could Y, in headlines, evaluated as a boolean would be interesting to get statistics on.

Is it usually false, or an exaggeration meant to motivate further funding for something non-profitable?

akomtu2• 4 years ago

"X as Y" is another boolean operator of pseudo-journalism, means two unrelated things stitched together to get more clicks.

PhasmaFelis• 4 years ago

Like how any development related to human prosthetics or exoskeletons gets compared to Iron Man since the 2008 movie.

notacanofsoda• 4 years ago

I'm partial to "X after Y" myself. Example: Stock market crashes after man eats a hot dog. Implying causation is great clickbait.

EarlKing• 4 years ago

Don't forget the popular "[<modal_verb>|'Is'|'Are'] X Y?" -- because Betteridge's Law of Headlines is almost invariably accurate.

lebubule7• 4 years ago

While I would agree with you that media often phrase thing the mentioned way, I would prefer here to state that X implies Y. The question is more whether it will be picked up more widely at industry scale.

We took great care to show real-world applicability of our work.

jjtheblunt3• 4 years ago

right: it's diminishing the validity of the work, when some journalist's title looks click-bait-y, and that's just not appropriate.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

I wonder if this technology has been sitting waiting to be discovered for a long time. I read somewhere that the astronauts who walked on the moon has gold-covered helmet glass to shield them from the sun.

brnt• 4 years ago

Ah, those famous moon fogs...

herendin2• 4 years ago

The gold layer may have been on the inside

satvikpendem• 4 years ago

Moon dust is very deadly, breathing it in is akin to getting pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

dylan6042• 4 years ago

ah, those famous sunrises with no UV protection whatsoever. fog would be a blessing

nkrisc• 4 years ago

When the sun rises on the moon, it’s just the sun versus you and whatever protection you can wear. There’s no atmosphere to coddle you.

bombolo2• 4 years ago

It's probably just very expensive and doesn't survive cleaning them.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

Gold is extremely ductile. As thus thin layers of it are pretty cheap.

Not surviving is probably more reasonable reason.

weberer• 4 years ago

Gold leaf is actually very cheap since its so thin. I can't imagine something like this costing more than a dollar in gold.

lebubule7• 4 years ago

Work and studies of metal films and thin films as well as their fabrication has been going on for more than a century. Basically since electromagnetism is popular.

Fabrication tools for thin films have improved a lot over the past decades though. We can now fabricate exotic structured matter at the nanoscale that doesn't respond as the bulk counterpart.

kirenida3• 4 years ago

Great. Now, when will we get glasses that don't get scratched up when you wipe them without rinsing them first?

zppln• 4 years ago

Or even better, glasses that don't require cleaning at all...

dools2• 4 years ago

Or some sort of corrective eye surgery which obviates the need for glasses altogether!

sgt• 4 years ago

Or tiny little windshield wiper arms.

devjab• 4 years ago

As long as luxottica has a monopoly on glass for glasses (is that the correct english word? Is it lens?) I doubt we're going to see too much improvement in the wear-down. Maybe that's pessimistic of me, but there really hasn't been much innovation on glass for glasses in my 25 years of wearing glasses.

Maybe glass for glasses is at its zenith, but it's sort of hard to believe that when you look at something like smartphone screen changes over the past 10-15 years.

kgwgk2• 4 years ago

As long as luxottica has a monopoly on glass for glasses (is that the correct english word? Is it lens?)

"Monopoly" is not the correct word. At least in a global sense - they are more dominant in some places.

Semaphor2• 4 years ago

We do?

I recently got new glasses after 5 years, I almost never wet them before wiping them, and I usually wipe them with my t-shirt. Zero scratches on old glasses, it was actually the finish on my frame that started failing and prompted getting a replacement (turned out my eyes also degraded slightly, so I got new lenses anyway)

kirenida3• 4 years ago

Plastic or glass lenses? Any special coatings? Do you remember the manufacturer?

snowwrestler2• 4 years ago

The key is to brush all the dust off, then wipe only for oils.

You can use the edges of a lens cloth to brush first. Grip it in the middle so all the edges bunch together to form a sort of brush. Or a dedicated product that separates the two steps: this is the best glasses cleaner I’ve ever used:

https://carbonklean.com/product/peeps-vision/

kirenida3• 4 years ago

Easy to use, compact and never expires!
Our technology will clean your lenses 500 times!

I know that you're supposed to get the dust off first, and I wash my glasses daily with dish soap, but I want to be able to use any clean paper tissue or cloth to clean my glasses, without having to worry about having an emergency lens cloth on my at all times.

bartvk• 4 years ago

This would be great in situations where you can't easily clean your glasses. Lots of people have some kind of protection on. Motorcycle riders, welders, people working in cleanrooms or other labs.

unwind2• 4 years ago

So, it's a thin layer of gold consisting of all-connected particles, thus forming a conducting layer. Then they sandwich that between layers of titanium oxide for protection, not sure if that will help with mechanical durability.

Since it's dependent on an external source of (I guess infrared radiation) heat, it will not work in e.g. winter in the Nordics when there's not a lot of sunshine around.

My conclusion: it's designed for fancy skiing folks in Switzerland's sunny alps, not tired parents trying to see where the fsck the kids went when coming home after picking them up in the afternoon. Time for sunset in Stockholm today: 2:56 pm.

On a more serious note this really sounds promising, all development that improve aspects of wearing glasses is of course awesome since not all can/want to use contacts etc.

lebubule7• 4 years ago

Hi there,

I am a co-author of the mentioned work and very surprised (but pleased) to see it here.

I think that this is a good overview!

On the material part the sweet spot is the transition from assemblies of particles to forming a continuous path (film).

For the application you indeed need sunlight. The sun is a strong radiation source!

Putting your face under a light bulb might cause other issues.

Glasses is here the most accessible example to illustrate the work from the research to the application. I think we can get creative about other use cases.

unwind2• 4 years ago

Thanks! Apologies if I sounded overly salty/negative, that was not my intention. I don't ski, but obviously skiers also deserve seeing where they are going, it has safety benefits. :)

jakzurr• 4 years ago

I'd have to say that any small heat source might make this technology quite workable. Even conducting a bit of heat from your head to the glasses frame, to the lens coatings, perhaps?

someweirdperson• 4 years ago

Putting your face under a light bulb might cause other issues.

Radiate it from the inside, at some invisible wave legth that doesn't reflect too much?

djmips• 4 years ago

Could it be useful for automobile windscreens? The article says it's solved for cars with embedded wires but this is not generally seen in the front windscreen - probably because it impairs vision and maybe even makes the glass less robust. I checked and it seems now we do have windscreens with electric heat but perhaps your system could be adapted to the lower end cars.

stuaxo• 4 years ago

Plenty of houses in the UK in older buildings where it would be great in windows.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

Why titania protection layers and not silica or alumina?

e12e• 4 years ago

Time for sunset in Stockholm today: 2:56 pm.

Sunset? Time for sunrise here is around mid-day, January 21st :)

xattt• 4 years ago

I can see this being integrated into Apple’s AR headset that can tap into a battery for heat for a “defogging” function.

iLoveOncall• 4 years ago

My conclusion: it's designed for fancy skiing folks in Switzerland's sunny alps, not tired parents trying to see where the fsck the kids went when coming home after picking them up in the afternoon.

Yeah I got that at "gold layer".

danbruc• 4 years ago

I remember hearing somewhere that the glass doors of supermarket fridges have a coating that prevents them from fogging so that you can always see the products at display and that made me realize that they are indeed never fogged. If I remember correctly, they said that the coating uses europium.

xn• 4 years ago

Could body heat be transferred from the ears or nose to the gold layer to heat it?

lebubule7• 4 years ago

Yes it could. But, it requires absorbing radiation further down in the infrared and power is an issue to consider! What radiates more your ears or a sun?

bluGill• 4 years ago

The heat transfer that way is slow. Most of the heat will dissipate before it reaches the glass. You can calculate how much the difference will be, but realistically the amount of heat you transfer this way is zero.

snowwrestler2• 4 years ago

I had a pair of glasses that did not fog. The lenses were coated with a hydrophilic coating, which absorbed the tiny droplets of water that make up fog. Once it was saturated, water could form large droplets but not fog.

This is basically how licking your lenses or spitting on them works, or stuff like Cat Crap. The difference here is that the coating was baked on; it could not be rinsed off.

The downside was that the coating was very soft when wet and easy to damage. So it’s not really commercially viable. I bought a pair directly from the inventor, with trust between us that long-term performance was up to my discipline in protecting the lens coating.

They also had to be hand-washed regularly as contaminants in the river water would impair the anti-fog coating as well.

They worked great until I left them on top of my car and drove home one day…

deafpolygon• 4 years ago

Elton John was onto something.

blastro• 4 years ago

Sulfonating polycarbonates is an effective way to prevent fog. It just hasn't become widely adopted. Tech has been around for decades.

A thin gold layer could be the secret to glasses that don't fog

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