Commercial "LCD" glass

Check into a modern hotel in Tokyo for a demo :-)

If you are in Melbourne and want to see it in action ask for a tour of Telstra's Global Operations Centre in Clayton. The viewing room has this facility for the glassed area facing the main operations floor space. Impressive, and it operates very quickly from clear to fully opaque and vice versa. Nothing new. The switchable windows have been in use at the GOC since it was put into operation in the 1990s.

Cheers, Alan

Is it available in small quantities? It seems ideal for protecting my car number plate from the weather :)

LOL

Naturally someone's already thought of it and is flogging them. Have a look at

Bob

I think it is interesting that the first mooted use for the technology of transparent/opaque glass using liquid crystal was as a glass wall, transparent during the day, opaque at night. Nothing came of it. I read of it in Popular Science, or Popular Mechanics, in the late nineteen forties. Loved those magazines!

Evidently it also works as a projection screen.

Have a look at this.

I think I read somewhere that they used this technology for some swish toilets somewhere where you could see the architects 'clean' creation when the cubicle was unoccupied and it went opaque when occupied.

Apparently it used a motion sensor to detect the occupied state but had a minor short-coming in the design when people fell asleep inside...

The motion sensor sounds like a good idea. ;-)

I thought that was the idea, to stop people staying inside too long? It sounds a warning buzzer before going clear.

Doesn't the Blue Mt's skyway car also use an LCD glass floor? Apparently so you can look down when over the gorge, but men underneath can't look up women's dresses when the car approaches the platform :-)

MrT.

Does anyone know of any commercially available residential solutions? We're building a new house soon.

There's a restaurant in Milton, Brisbane, that has this glass in its toilets. VERY disturbing, so my wife says.

Dave