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?

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

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

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

Especially when Y is reporting by the same outlet. “Political result X happens after our media outlet revealed Y”

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

That's the equivalent of variable definition: var X = Y.

Men are XY

true, but you don't match the parent comment's implied regex!

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.

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

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.

Ah, those famous moon fogs...

The gold layer may have been on the inside

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

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

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.

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

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

Not surviving is probably more reasonable reason.

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

The coating is just a few nanometers thin. Price wouldn't be the main issue there.

I can imagine the material used for lenses is also rather cheap, and yet somehow they end up costing undreds of euros each... I wonder why...

Because of this monopoly - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica

They weren't cheap before either

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.

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

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

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

The need for sunglasses??

Implanting self-tinting artificial lenses, maybe? Wouldn’t want that, but seems entirely possible.

yes! a thin film of gold over our eyeballs!

you mean grills? for your eyes? holy shite! did you just start the next trend in hiphop?

You are late to the party, Keratopigmentation (Eye color change surgery) is a thing. And done wrongly can have severe consequences, ofc.

Would you actually risk having elective surgery on your eyes - which are irreplaceable - when it's easy and simple to just change your glasses if your prescription changes?

Make your decisions for your own body, but LASIK is popular for a reason.

I don't really see how LASIK can work.

that seems like a personal problem.

there's a body of proof that it does, both theoretically and practically, and it's been around long enough now that we know about the long term effects.

?

Laser eye surgery is a well practiced surgery what are you talking about..?

I just for PRK and while the recovery is way worse than LASIK, the results are already great 2 months in.

Okay, but how do you change what prescription you need?

I don't need a prescription. In 15+ years once I'm in my 40s and my eye sight starts naturally deteriorating maybe I'll need reading glasses, but that's unpreventable.

I saw in another comment you were asking about side effects. There definitely are, and tbh if you're happy w/ glasses and they work for your lifestyle then more power to you. LASIK side effects from what I've read are most commonly really dry eyes and star burst effects from light sources at night. Seems a lot of people after going through PRK have bad night vision (which I'm experiencing), and moderate to severe light sensitivity, which I personally have none of. So yea, there are side effects that can be really bad, but for the most part people seem very happy with both LASIK and PRK.

I can certainly say PRK was one of my best life decisions, it's definitely been worth it to me because I hated wearing glasses and I do a lot of outdoor activities as well as Jiu jitsu, so I was basically the ideal candidate

The star burst thing sounds like a total pain in the tits if you want to drive at night, which even down south here at 56°N is about 16 hours of the day at this time of year.

I find I need different glasses for different things but I'm very very long-sighted - I can see more than well enough to drive, and indeed can see the guy wires on radio towers a few miles either side of the road I drive on most days to get to work, and can see what the dude in front is watching on his phone instead of the road, but can't really see the instrument panel except as a big green blob with a vague suggestion of pointers in it. No matter, as long as nothing is lit up red.

I wear different glasses for reading to using the computer or watching TV, basically to pull the range of focus I have in to about half a metre to a metre, or a metre to a couple of metres, and I have a couple of pairs of prescription safety glasses which fit under the visor of my climbing helmet, which is handy for work.

For welding and such, I just keep some cheap shitty "pound shop" reading glasses that are "close enough" and that I don't care if they get wrecked in the workshop, which again fit under my welding mask or grinder shield.

I do kind of wonder how well people who have had LASIK can deal with a very very wide range of focal lengths.

I would absolutely get LASIK if my eyes had stopped degrading.

If you haven't seen a doctor do it now. There are progressive conditions which can rob you of your remaining sight if you don't intervene.

I see an optometrist every year. But my eye sight is degrading over time (which is normal). As I understand, there’s no point getting LASIK until your eyes have stopped degrading, since if you got them fixed, they would just degrade anyway.

already got the surgery 12 years ago

Does it actually work? With no side-effects?

Implantable contact lenses (ICL) are low risk and can be changed if needed. I'm still happy I got the surgery 10 years ago, is a good alternative to LASIK

Or tiny little windshield wiper arms.

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.

> 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.

Monopolies tend to be local.

I don't think that their "monopoly" in the Democratic Republic of Congo and places like that is holding innovation back though.

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 my 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)

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

"Hilux Eynoa 1.67 Sensity" with "Hard HVL Blue control, Sensity Grau".

It's luckily in Paperless ;) I could buy a modern GPU for that price, paid 262 € per lens.

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/

> 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.

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.

Why are people with glasses still wearing masks?

You should have been the first to realise that if a mask is fogging up your glasses it's doing about sweet f all to prevent COVID transmission.

Water is a very small molecule, so moisture escaping through your mask doesn't mean other things are also escaping.

You can find explanations of how masks work on the internet pretty easily, like here for example https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/11/fac...

It's not moisture escaping through the mask that fogs glasses, it's moisture leaking around the edge. The efficacy of the filter material is irrelevant when it's bypassed because of poor mask fit. Good masks do not fog glasses.

I used to think this, but it's really not the case.

See, e.g. https://www.ijccm.org/doi/IJCCM/pdf/10.5005/jp-journals-1007...

So because somebody can open a door in your house you shouldn't insulate the rest of the house?

> Why are people with glasses still wearing masks?

Even a crappy mask can still give others some protection from your coughs & sneezes. Plus, I've noticed it can help remind people that you wish to keep some distance (whether it's for their benefit or for yours).

As an aside, I finally tried a good fitting N95 (3M) and tried it outside today for an hour walk in 35-deg-F weather. First time I've never had my glasses fog; not even a bit.

Yeah, don't really need a mask outside if you avoid crowds, but the air quality was less than perfect here today.

Even the regular surgical masks come in many different qualities. I was used to the grocery store variety and always struggled with fogging glasses, but when I was in hospital earlier this year (appendicitis), the masks they gave out fit much better around the nose, and my glasses didn't fog up at all.

> Even a crappy mask can still give others some protection from your coughs & sneezes.

The evidence is incredibly clear on this. It doesn't. No mask wearing has resulted in less COVID transmission on any population around the world.

N95 masks are the only things that work - but they don't fog your glasses.

Good masks have a soft seal around the nose and don't fog up glasses.

So why do we need gold lenses?

I feel like a lot of the kneejerk responses here are failing to read the context of my comment here correctly.

That's one good thing about glasses. They alert you when you are not wearing your face mask correctly, or when your mask deforms and it's time to get a new one.

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.

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.

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. :)

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?

> 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?

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.

Yes, of course there is still much work left for full scale industrializing but nothing insurmountable in view.

My Ford Fiesta has windscreen heating. IIRC the patent is owned by Ford but I could be wrong.

Not really. Windscreen heating is quite common in the industry, and the patents lie with the glass suppliers (No Vehicle Company builds their glass themselves). Most common techniques are thin tungsten wires or a heatable thin metal layer which additionally acts as IR-reflection.

You say it’s common but it didn’t used to be. It was common on Fords but no other vehicle manufacturer had it. Rear window heating, sure. But not front windscreen.

Moreover, Ford dealerships (in the U.K. at least) would boast that they owned the patent.

Looking online, I can see lots of references on car enthusiast sites talking about Ford owning the patent but any documents on the patent I find states it’s owned by an independent window manufacturer (like you suggested it would be).

So that leaves me wondering if either Ford had the patent but then sold it (unlikely in my opinion), or if they simply bought exclusively rights?

Surely Volvo had it? Feels like a very Volvo feature.

The VW egolf had it in 2015 or so…

Yeah, I’m talking a good few years ago now.

The patent would have long since expired — never mind any deals between patent holders.

Do you have a link? The patent I could find was filed by Ford and expired in 2015: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5824993A/en

Actually that patent looks different to what I'm describing.

The only car I’ve ever owned with a heated windscreen was a Ford Focus. It worked a treat and was still really useful even after some of the conductors corroded and stopped working.

Oh man, our Ford Mondeo (UK must be 15 years ago) had the fine heating wires in the front windscreen - best defrost/demist ever, almost instantaneous compared to every other vehicle I've driven. Definitely a feature that would sway me from choosing one vehicle over another!

I've had heated windscreens in various Škodas for 10+ years - now a must have feature for me when buying a new car.

For some reason I've always remembered that Concorde electrically heated its windows using a laminated layer of gold:

https://www.heritageconcorde.com/concorde-fuselage-windows

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

Why titania protection layers and not silica or alumina?

Titania has higher refractive index. It helps improve slightly the performance.

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

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

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

> 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".

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.

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

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?

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.

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…

Elton John was onto something.

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