Smarter than Smart: Multifunctional Smart Glass

While electrochromic glass is useful for transmission control, new multifunctional smart glass developed by ZEISS introduces a wide range of other capabilities, such as eye tracking or gesture tracking, without any visible optical systems. Multifunctional glass contains a series of integrated microstructured optics that are completely invisible. Dr. Alexandre Gatto from ZEISS Microstructured Optics stated that, “you can use any size of glass you like with any number of functions. The smart glass will soon be able to illuminate, identify, filter and project. It’s a fantastic innovation that could be used to do great things in augmented reality and in the automotive industry.”

Figure 2: Transparent multifunctional smart glass simultaneously acts as a window, imaging system, and display

Multifunctional smart glass is still under development by ZEISS, but they showcased it in a gesture recognition demonstration at SPIE Photonics West 2019 in San Francisco, U.S. This technology has an immense range of potential applications from intuitive gesture recognition systems, smart homes with variable transmission glass surfaces that also act as displays, heads up displays for automotive windshields, and wearable technology for augmented reality. Similar technology is already used for semi-transparent displays in smart refrigerators and other types of advanced displays.