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Stories filed under: "optics"
DailyDirt: High Tech And Rose-Colored Glasses
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Virtual reality or augmented reality goggles are getting a lot of hype, but some of us who need to wear glasses all the time just to see normally are probably not looking forward to wearing bulky electronics on top of regular eyeglasses. Unfortunately, VR/AR goggles tend to cater to people with 20/20 vision first, and then provide some footnote about how corrective lenses might be compatible in the future. Well, if we’re all going to be wearing glasses someday, how about making them a bit more useful?
- Eyeglasses that autofocus in real time for people with vision problems like presbyopia sounds useful enough. Deep Optics says it’ll be 2 years before its prototypes are ready for extensive real world testing, and we had mentioned PixelOptics EmPower before, but it looks like that company had some problems with its glasses and couldn’t recover. [url]
- Can orange-colored glasses have an effect on how well you sleep? Everyone seems to have bought into the idea that blue light is bad at night (hence the Night Shift mode for more phones), but wearing glasses to block out blues all day seems like overkill — and it probably doesn’t address the real problems of not getting enough sleep to begin with. [url]
- Maybe you’ve heard of pinhole glasses as a treatment for nearsightedness? Okay, pinhole glasses can work in a limited way (blocking most of your field of vision while you use them), but they’re not a cure for anything. Looking through a pinhole (or any small aperture) can work if you’re really in a bind, but it’s not really an alternative to regular glasses/contacts/LASIK/etc. [url]
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Filed Under: eyesight, glasses, goggles, lenses, myopia, nearsightedness, night shift, optics, pinhole glasses, presbyopia, vision
Companies: deep optics, pixeloptics
DailyDirt: Dangerous Death-Ray Buildings
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
When architects design a new building or bridge, they really need to think through a lot of little details because these things usually last a long time (and take a long time to build). There are some famous design mistakes like the (original) Tacoma Narrows bridge which serves as a physics lesson for high school kids and a cautionary tale for any engineering/architecture students. Here are a few more potential physics lessons (in optics) involving buildings that demonstrate the real-word effect of “the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.”
- Architect Rafael Vinoly has designed a London building that isn’t quite finished yet, but sunlight reflected off its curved glass panels focuses on the ground and gets hot enough to melt cars. The skyscraper was previously called the “Walkie Talkie” for its overall shape, but now some folks are referring to it as the “fryscaper” after its death ray problem. [url]
- The shiny stainless steel exterior of the Walt Disney Concert Hall created a nice warm glow for residents across the street when the building was new in 2004. The architects had actually tried to take into account the glare of the building, but during construction some panels were placed at a slightly different angle than were in the plans. [url]
- In 2010, the Vdara hotel in Las Vegas featured its own death ray, magnifying the desert sun onto a swimming pool area where guests weren’t pleasantly greeted by temperatures that could cook a steak. This hotel was also designed by architect Rafael Vinoly, so perhaps he should lay off of the parabolic window for a while…. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: architecture, buildings, death ray, design, fryscaper, optics, rafael vinoly, vdara hotel