Electrochromic

Windows are pretty basic necessities for letting in light and heat, but you don’t always want both at once. Now engineers at North Carolina State University have developed a new material that allows windows to easily switch between three modes.

Born in 2020, the Maserati MC20 reminds us that light shines even in the darkest times. And in this case, that light gives new life, leading to the much-anticipated convertible MC20 Cielo, a butterfly-doored spyder with electrochromic roof.

As sunlight passes through a building's windows it can cause indoor temperatures to rise, to the point that the structure's air conditioning system has to be used. A new window material, however, blocks incoming heat while staying mostly transparent.

Tech startup Ampere has smartened up the humble sunglasses with Dusk, a pair of shades that change tint on demand via a phone app or a button press. A deluxe model also packs built-in speakers and a microphone for making calls.

If you're tired of sliding the shades up and down on airplane windows, then you might want to fly on a Boeing 777X. This week, it was announced that some of the aircraft will forgo the shades for electronically-dimmable windows (EDWs).

Future windows could change their tint or opacity on demand to keep out unwanted heat, light or nosy neighbors. A team from Princeton has now developed a self-powered “smart window” system that uses a transparent solar cell to harvest UV energy from sunlight.

Companies are experimenting with ways to balance glass' ability to let light in with the need for a little privacy. Now, Kinestral has unveiled a new system of smart-tinting glass called Halio, which can be adjusted manually or set up to switch automatically.

Current electrochromic window tinting technologies are generally slow to change state, struggle to achieve high levels of darkness, and rely on a constant current to maintain their tint. A team at MIT has developed an energy-efficient thin film material that overcomes these shortcomings.

If you're bursting in and out of shadowy forests, the slow reaction time of photochromic glasses just can't keep up. That's where Uvex's Variotronic glasses come in, which change tint in just a tenth of a second. We recently tried a pair out.

In less than a year, electrochromic sunglasses have gone from being experimental to an actual product, with Ctrl announcing its Ctrl One cycling glasses just this month. Should you prefer multi-use electronically-tinting sunglasses, however, you might want to get yourself a pair of Skugga shades.

Glasses with transitional lenses are a neat idea in theory, but they have some shortcomings in practice. That's why researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology are developing an alternative – clear eyeglasses that can be manually tinted into sunglasses, by the user.

As the mechanical iris lens in a normal camera is far too large and bulky to incorporate in smartphones and other compact mobile devices, a team of researchers has developed a non-mechanical, "smart glass" iris that may bring much greater image quality to future smartphones.