Smart ovens are now a thing, as are intelligent beds, connected doorbells, and internet-enabled fridges. Everything, it seems, is now “smart” and “connected” — and soon the windows in your home or office could be hit with the smart stick too.
There has been a flurry of activity in the smart glass realm over the past few months, and two Californian companies in particular are knuckling down to bring self-tinting windows to companies and residencies en masse.
Last week, San Francisco-based Kinestral Technologies (“Kinestral”) announced the inaugural installation of its Halio electrochromic smart-tinting glass at the San Francisco offices of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a real estate investment trust. Halio is touted as “the most responsive smart-tinting glass on the market,” according to the company’s own marketing blurb, with an innate ability to switch from clear to dark in seconds, delivering its darkest tint in less than 3 minutes.
It basically negates the need for blinds or curtains, as the glass automatically dims and brightens to suit the outdoors light conditions — this is useful in controlling a room’s ambience and temperature, while also reducing a building’s energy needs. Users can also manually control the tint settings through wall switches, mobile apps, and if recent tests go according to plan, your voice. Yes, Kinestral wants to integrate Amazon’s Alexa voice-activated technology into its smart windows.
The glass isn’t designed purely for use on exterior facades, though. It can be used anywhere inside a building so that light from one room can travel through to other rooms when required, or be (partially) blocked if the situation requires it. For example, Kinestral replaced the existing glass in a central skylight above the employee lounge at Alexandria’s San Francisco hub, while Halio was also added to two meeting rooms, creating glass walls that served as opaque partitions when needed — to improve the clarity of a wall-mounted LCD TV, for example, or simply to create more privacy. The windows can be undimmed whenever light or visibility is needed.
“We see applications for Kinestral’s Halio smart-tinting glass in both interior and exterior glazing locations,” explained Greg Gehlen, senior vice president of construction and development at Alexandria. “In exterior locations, the glass can limit glare in the dark state without blinds while allowing clear vision in the clear state. In interior locations, we are using this for variable privacy in conference rooms.”
Kinestral has raised almost $100 million in funding since its inception back in 2010, the biggest chunk of which came via a $65 million round just a few months back. But seven years is a long time from inception to product launch, so what’s been going on behind the scenes?
“Our founders were determined to solve the challenges of electrochromic glass,” explained Craig Henricksen, marketing VP at Kinestral, in an interview with VentureBeat. “They were not going to go out with a product that was only incrementally better. Solving the color issues, the tinting speed, and uniformity during tinting was extremely important to them. It took dozens of scientists to solve the problems, and fine-tune the chemistry and processes to make a product viable.”
And so after years of development and iteration, over the past couple of years Kinestral has built a production facility in Hayward, California, while back in March Kinestral inked a $100 million deal with Foxconn subsidiary G-Tech Optoelectronics Corporation (GTOC) to convert an existing LCD touch panel manufacturing facility in Taiwan to produce Halio at scale.
Also based out of California is a more established smart glass player called View, which was founded in 2007 and has raised a gargantuan $550 million in funding across a number of big rounds, including $100 million back in February.
View’s glass-tinting smarts adopts a model-based control system that uses algorithms to automatically adjust tint levels based on a number of factors, including a building’s location, design, layout, orientation, time of day, and even the weather conditions outside, explained Erich Klawuhn, View’s VP of product, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Light sensors and real-time weather feeds inform the system of current and upcoming weather conditions, including cloud cover, and adjusts the tint levels accordingly,” he said. “Via a small electrical voltage, View Dynamic Glass transitions seamlessly between multiple tint states either automatically or by personal preferences programmed through tablet or smartphone apps.”
View says that over the past year it has doubled the number of installations of its electrochromic Dynamic Glass, which is made of the same kind of material as Kinestral’s. View now counts more than 300 complete commercial installations with another 150 in the works, and last month it was enlisted to retrofit Netflix’s new Los Gatos offices with self-tinting glass.
“Our mission is to create delightful human environments, free of glare and unwanted heat,” added Klawuhn. “By providing the right amount of natural light and optimizing the views of nature, View Dynamic Glass enhances the productivity and wellness of building occupants, as well as providing sustainability for the planet.”
Through the looking glass
The concept behind smart glass is nothing new, and there have been various versions of the technology over the years, some less smart than others. Thermochromic glass essentially uses the heat from sunlight to tint the windows — the hotter it is, the darker the room becomes, allowing properties to regulate their own heat. But everything is automatic and there is no manual control.
Then there are liquid crystal windows, which use technology similar to that found in many digital wristwatches. A thin layer of liquid crystals is positioned in between two transparent electrical conductors on plastic films, which in turn is sandwiched between two layers of glass. The collective term for this kind of technology is PDLC, or “polymer dispersed liquid crystal,” and it uses electrical voltage to control the transparency — however, a constant power supply is required for completely transparency, else the glass turns translucent. The level of translucence depends on the voltage applied, and the technology is largely used to enhance privacy indoors, for example in conference rooms or on shower doors.
Then there’s…