7 ms·

For the people kinda worried: this is a highly specialized piece of glass that is extremely complicated to manufacture at present and must, due to the laws of t

For the people kinda worried: this is a highly specialized piece of glass that is extremely complicated to manufacture at present and must, due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. It's not going to allow surveillance through existing glass installations in any form, just possibly new ones if there's room for the support equipment and through the use of 4-5 digit piles of cash. Any camera glass like this will have at least a mild tint and will be used in specialty applications. It'll also have pretty horrible SNR, resolution, and low light performance. Currently the structural component of this tech is mainly used in extremely high end aerospace applications (various heads up display type systems) so it's unlikely you'll ever run across one of these within the next decade. Nasty remote sensing tech people can be worried about right now: RF surveillance from various combinations of mmWave, wall penetrating radar, and wifi interferometry. Add in the fact that your IPhone has mac randomization but every other device you own including your car's TPMS doesn't. Also Geiger mode lidar is fun, one company I worked for mapped the inside of a random person's house with it as a demo.

sroussey 3y ago
I agree with everything you said, but the example on the CES floor does not have an apparent tint.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
  I assure you it is semi opaque. A one way mirror is a primitive example of this. You can make the reflection increasingly transparent but it will be tinted up until the point it doesn't reflect anything. It may not be noticeably visible to the human eye under most lighting conditions, though.
  - godelski 3y ago
    >> but the example on the CES floor does not have an __apparent__ tint. > I assure you it is semi opaque > It may not be __noticeably visible__ to the human eye under most lighting conditions, though. I'm not sure you two are disagreeing. Seems like you're just reinforcing their point. I mean if someone said glass is opaque and their evidence is that you can't see through glass and your evidence is to point at UV light... well... you'd be technically correct but you're talking from a different ballpark.
    - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
      Typically people can see better in the dark than imaging sensors can (only considering visible spectrum here), especially small sensors. If you redirect the light somewhere, what would you see? How much light would you need to divert? If the image is grayscale and has very high gain/noise/ISO, then I imagine with a low enough frame rate you could avoid noticable tinting. You would likely still notice the tint in comparison to regular glass, I'm too lazy to do the napkin math though. Practically speaking, I would expect it to be strictly more noticeable than glass for holographic projection. If true, it's likely noticeable. But the eye is fickle. You don't notice the tint of, say, a car window when you've been inside for a bit. Or sunglasses. Here's an arbitrary Google search result for in-glass HUDs: https://www.lumineq.com/applications/automotive https://www.lumineq.com/applications/automotive They state their glass is 70% transparent. That's definitely noticeably opaque.
      - godelski 3y ago
        > in the dark I don't think how you framed this is accurate. The quality is a function of the pixel size and of course the exposure time. I mean those are the two main variables that control how much light hits the sensor, but we'd have to get into sensitivity to make direct comparisons (human eyes are VERY sensitive and some evidence that the average eye is sensitive to a single photon, but you're not going to see well with that and this is besides the point). Definitely not a straight forward calculation and I'm feeling too lazy to go grab my optics books. But guesstimating here, there should be enough light considering you can see light and distortions when looking at the side of a pane. So I'd lean on it being more about the quality of the signal. Which glass is highly structured but I'm assuming that this type of glass has some unique optical properties to specifically make the side panels have higher quality signals. My understanding is that they are projecting from the side, so that's what I'm inferring from -- basically just reverse the photon direction through the medium and I don't have reason to believe that quality is directionally dependent (should I?). My whole spitballing is dependent on this understanding. > it's likely noticeable. Well one user said they didn't notice it. > They state their glass is 70% transparent. That's definitely noticeably opaque. That's not uncommon for Low-E glass, so maybe not very noticeable, especially in many different environments. But yeah, I think if you compared side by side you'd notice. I think we're just using different criteria and we probably decently align? Idk, I am mostly thinking aloud here, so I do want to portray that I don't have high confidence here. It's been 10 years since I've been in an optics lab lol. But I've built microphones with really weak signals before and they are useful. Distorted, but useful. (Definitely not fun being forced to run experiments at 3am and find out someone is walking around on the other side of the building...) So I can't see why this couldn't (theoretically) be similarly done for a window? I definitely don't think this would work with a typical pane of glass, especially considering how they're cut, but this does seem like specialty glass specifically built for directing photons directed from an edge to the pane face. Any idea if it can only display to one face? (I'm sure you can invert img but projection face probably matters for a camera?)
- hnbad 3y ago
  Neither do most storefront windows and yet they're often made to reduce the transmission of UV light to protect displayed goods from sunlight or intentionally darkened so they're less transparent when the display is not lit up. You just don't notice it normally or dismiss it as an effect of ordinary glare, which is the point.
neallindsay 3y ago
I agree that this shouldn't be anywhere near the top of people's privacy concern list. A $1 traditional digital camera can already be hidden very easily and this probably costs thousands of dollars at least if you could even get it. It's still creepy though.
nonrepeating 3y ago
Thanks. The original description made this seem like far-future technological magic. A system that can somehow analyze a random pane of glass and derive all the transformations needed to use it as a high-precision waveguide? I actually had a manager ask me to develop such a thing, and I asked him how many dozen optics PhDs I could hire to accomplish this feat.
- shrx 3y ago
  Apparently the number is finite.
Krasnol 3y ago
So what you say is: this early prototype might be hard to see if it's not close up? I mean, this will be worse if the tech advances no?
thfuran 3y ago
>and must, due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. It's perhaps worth noting, however, that it wouldn't be unusual for a window to have only ~60% transmittance in visible spectrum.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  A fresh piece of uncoated perfectly clean glass is ~ 90% transparent.
  - dghughes 3y ago
    I think people think that light goes through glass like a laser beam nothing in its way. Just flying right through. But it's actually like a pool ball hitting another pool ago and so on. The original photon of light is not what you see on the other side of the glass.
    - p1mrx 3y ago
      > The original photon of light is not what you see on the other side of the glass. Oh no! How do I check if I'm getting counterfeit sunlight?
    - liftm 3y ago
      I did mostly think that. So what's the thing in the glass that gets hit like the "another pool ball"?
      - mensetmanusman 3y ago
        The oscillations of charge in the glass.
    - ithkuil 3y ago
      I found this 3blue1brown video to be a fascinating explaination on how light gets transmitted by transparent material: https://youtu.be/KTzGBJPuJwM?si=hw_SIaklkqfVSGnc https://youtu.be/KTzGBJPuJwM?si=hw_SIaklkqfVSGnc
godelski 3y ago
> due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. How useful is this statement though? Regular glass isn't 100% transparent either, even in just the visible spectrum. Shouldn't we be more concerned with the delta in the visible spectrum is if we're concerned about easy identification? (before mentioning that plenty of glass is purposefully tinted and dynamic tinting is an application here) And reasonably, couldn't we, theoretically, pick up a decent signal from simply capturing the reflections around the glass edge? I mean we can now do 3D reconstructions from pointing a camera at a mirrored ball. I'm sure it'd be very noisy, but there is signal. I mean to have the capability of projecting you'd have the ability to do the reverse too given that I doubt the internal structure of the glass would be (that) directionally dependent. Right? I can be missing something, it's been awhile since I've done optics.
- fortyseven 3y ago
  I was just thinking to make ALL the glass the same tint, regardless of specialty.
MrYellowP 3y ago
You can't know how much it improves in a year, two, five.
Johnny555 3y ago
>For the people kinda worried: this is a highly specialized piece of glass that is extremely complicated to manufacture at present and must, due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. It's not going to allow surveillance through existing glass installations in any form If you're worried that your Airbnb host is going to use it to spy on you (which was mentioned in the article), unless you already scrutinize every nail hole, photo frame, electrical appliance, electrical outlets, smoke detector, etc, this doesn't open up a new vulnerability. Pinhole cameras with a lens as small as 2mm are already readily available and cheap, no ones going to use an expensive "window camera" to spy on you when they already have so many other options. Perhaps those that fear government surveillance or other well funded adversaries may have cause for concern, but few of us are in that category.
- theyinwhy 3y ago
  Pinhole cameras by definition do not have lenses and are known since 500 BCE or 1893 if you need a recording unit ;)
  - Johnny555 3y ago
    Language and technology has evolved a bit since 1893: https://www.google.com/search?q=pinhole+surveillance+camera https://www.google.com/search?q=pinhole+surveillance+camera
    - theyinwhy 3y ago
      But does the use of the word pinhole make any sense if it is not a pinhole but a "3.7mm" lense? Pinhole camera is a specific term used for more than a century now. It is well defined. Now someone from marketing thought "let's call our small camera a pinhole camera". Sry, but that is not a pinhole camera. That camera also exists since ages and is called an endoscope camera. Words are important in IT and if everyone would just think a bit more about terms they use we would have way less friction with business and less business logic bugs.
      - 3y ago
ijhuygft776 3y ago
> It's not going to allow surveillance through existing glass installations in any form, just possibly new ones if there's room for the support equipment and through the use of 4-5 digit piles of cash. Total surveillance is just a matter of time...
- WhackyIdeas 3y ago
  I agree. I had this worrying idea (realisation..?) that one day, maybe triple digit years away, maybe sooner, that tiny cameras and mics the size of grains of salt will be everywhere. They will cost nothing to produce, be self-charging, interconnected to each other and created to ‘reduce crime’ or ‘make you safer’. And in the same way as forever chemicals, you can’t get rid of them. Trillions of them, in fields, the ground. Spreading around stuck to your shoes, on your car tires. Just a crazy idea, but I think that if they could make that happen today then they would. And that part is the main point - There is no limit to surveillance anymore. I live in the UK, that realisation is in my face every day. Can’t even take a trip to Tesco without being run through facial recognition. There is no care for the concept of privacy anymore. All the richest companies in the world don’t make their money from caring about our privacy.
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    Politicians and high ranking unelected officials also will want privacy so truly omnipresent surveillance would be concomitant with jamming and obfuscation technologies. There’d just be endless arms race.
    - WhackyIdeas 3y ago
      There will come a time when everyone will face the panopticon though. It’ll be unavoidable, like forever chemicals. I suppose that will be when the machines take over!!
  - akamoonknight 3y ago
    I believe I read a science fiction book around this topic. Postsingular by Rudy Rucker I believe, related to nanotechnology. Can't remember most of it, but delved a little into how it affects relationships re: every thing being visible always to everyone. Not sure I'd entirely recommend it, but still interesting to see the thoughts and outcomes others come up with in regard to these types of potential technological changes.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
JCharante 3y ago
> and through the use of 4-5 digit piles of cash. 5 figures doesn't sound like much for an organized crime network
- kristjansson 3y ago
  Where could someone surreptitiously place a wildly expensive pane of glass they couldn’t already put an $20 hidden camera?
- AceyMan 3y ago
  I read it as the thickness of the deck of bills (thousands or more) so if they are 20s or 100s, that's be some serious funding.
ryukoposting 3y ago
> Add in the fact that your IPhone has mac randomization but every other device you own including your car's TPMS doesn't. The truly pathetic thing is that virtually all of these devices could use RPA but don't, because nobody remembered to flip that flag from "n" to "y"
Log_out_ 3y ago
Oh tempo oh rex moores
bradknowles 3y ago
There are some places where a not-completely 90% transparent piece of glass might not raise too much suspicion, but it could be more difficult to retrofit with a more traditional "pinhole" style spycam. Like the wall of a shower stall, which you would expect to be less than 100% transparent. I do think this threat model is less likely, however. What I think is more likely is a Minority Report style system where there are pervasive cameras everywhere, constantly scanning your face, etc.... Maybe not constantly scanning your retinas and identifying you that way, but facial recognition alone would be more than enough. Either way, once you're recognized, you could be easily tracked silently, or you could be called out publicly by a nearby display.

sroussey 3y ago

I agree with everything you said, but the example on the CES floor does not have an apparent tint.

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
I assure you it is semi opaque. A one way mirror is a primitive example of this. You can make the reflection increasingly transparent but it will be tinted up until the point it doesn't reflect anything. It may not be noticeably visible to the human eye under most lighting conditions, though.
- godelski 3y ago
  >> but the example on the CES floor does not have an __apparent__ tint. > I assure you it is semi opaque > It may not be __noticeably visible__ to the human eye under most lighting conditions, though. I'm not sure you two are disagreeing. Seems like you're just reinforcing their point. I mean if someone said glass is opaque and their evidence is that you can't see through glass and your evidence is to point at UV light... well... you'd be technically correct but you're talking from a different ballpark.
  - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    Typically people can see better in the dark than imaging sensors can (only considering visible spectrum here), especially small sensors. If you redirect the light somewhere, what would you see? How much light would you need to divert? If the image is grayscale and has very high gain/noise/ISO, then I imagine with a low enough frame rate you could avoid noticable tinting. You would likely still notice the tint in comparison to regular glass, I'm too lazy to do the napkin math though. Practically speaking, I would expect it to be strictly more noticeable than glass for holographic projection. If true, it's likely noticeable. But the eye is fickle. You don't notice the tint of, say, a car window when you've been inside for a bit. Or sunglasses. Here's an arbitrary Google search result for in-glass HUDs: https://www.lumineq.com/applications/automotive https://www.lumineq.com/applications/automotive They state their glass is 70% transparent. That's definitely noticeably opaque.
    - godelski 3y ago
      > in the dark I don't think how you framed this is accurate. The quality is a function of the pixel size and of course the exposure time. I mean those are the two main variables that control how much light hits the sensor, but we'd have to get into sensitivity to make direct comparisons (human eyes are VERY sensitive and some evidence that the average eye is sensitive to a single photon, but you're not going to see well with that and this is besides the point). Definitely not a straight forward calculation and I'm feeling too lazy to go grab my optics books. But guesstimating here, there should be enough light considering you can see light and distortions when looking at the side of a pane. So I'd lean on it being more about the quality of the signal. Which glass is highly structured but I'm assuming that this type of glass has some unique optical properties to specifically make the side panels have higher quality signals. My understanding is that they are projecting from the side, so that's what I'm inferring from -- basically just reverse the photon direction through the medium and I don't have reason to believe that quality is directionally dependent (should I?). My whole spitballing is dependent on this understanding. > it's likely noticeable. Well one user said they didn't notice it. > They state their glass is 70% transparent. That's definitely noticeably opaque. That's not uncommon for Low-E glass, so maybe not very noticeable, especially in many different environments. But yeah, I think if you compared side by side you'd notice. I think we're just using different criteria and we probably decently align? Idk, I am mostly thinking aloud here, so I do want to portray that I don't have high confidence here. It's been 10 years since I've been in an optics lab lol. But I've built microphones with really weak signals before and they are useful. Distorted, but useful. (Definitely not fun being forced to run experiments at 3am and find out someone is walking around on the other side of the building...) So I can't see why this couldn't (theoretically) be similarly done for a window? I definitely don't think this would work with a typical pane of glass, especially considering how they're cut, but this does seem like specialty glass specifically built for directing photons directed from an edge to the pane face. Any idea if it can only display to one face? (I'm sure you can invert img but projection face probably matters for a camera?)
hnbad 3y ago
Neither do most storefront windows and yet they're often made to reduce the transmission of UV light to protect displayed goods from sunlight or intentionally darkened so they're less transparent when the display is not lit up. You just don't notice it normally or dismiss it as an effect of ordinary glare, which is the point.

neallindsay 3y ago

I agree that this shouldn't be anywhere near the top of people's privacy concern list. A $1 traditional digital camera can already be hidden very easily and this probably costs thousands of dollars at least if you could even get it. It's still creepy though.

nonrepeating 3y ago

Thanks. The original description made this seem like far-future technological magic. A system that can somehow analyze a random pane of glass and derive all the transformations needed to use it as a high-precision waveguide? I actually had a manager ask me to develop such a thing, and I asked him how many dozen optics PhDs I could hire to accomplish this feat.

shrx 3y ago
Apparently the number is finite.

Krasnol 3y ago

So what you say is: this early prototype might be hard to see if it's not close up? I mean, this will be worse if the tech advances no?

thfuran 3y ago

>and must, due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. It's perhaps worth noting, however, that it wouldn't be unusual for a window to have only ~60% transmittance in visible spectrum.

mensetmanusman 3y ago
A fresh piece of uncoated perfectly clean glass is ~ 90% transparent.
- dghughes 3y ago
  I think people think that light goes through glass like a laser beam nothing in its way. Just flying right through. But it's actually like a pool ball hitting another pool ago and so on. The original photon of light is not what you see on the other side of the glass.
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    > The original photon of light is not what you see on the other side of the glass. Oh no! How do I check if I'm getting counterfeit sunlight?
  - liftm 3y ago
    I did mostly think that. So what's the thing in the glass that gets hit like the "another pool ball"?
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      The oscillations of charge in the glass.
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    I found this 3blue1brown video to be a fascinating explaination on how light gets transmitted by transparent material: https://youtu.be/KTzGBJPuJwM?si=hw_SIaklkqfVSGnc https://youtu.be/KTzGBJPuJwM?si=hw_SIaklkqfVSGnc

godelski 3y ago

> due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. How useful is this statement though? Regular glass isn't 100% transparent either, even in just the visible spectrum. Shouldn't we be more concerned with the delta in the visible spectrum is if we're concerned about easy identification? (before mentioning that plenty of glass is purposefully tinted and dynamic tinting is an application here) And reasonably, couldn't we, theoretically, pick up a decent signal from simply capturing the reflections around the glass edge? I mean we can now do 3D reconstructions from pointing a camera at a mirrored ball. I'm sure it'd be very noisy, but there is signal. I mean to have the capability of projecting you'd have the ability to do the reverse too given that I doubt the internal structure of the glass would be (that) directionally dependent. Right? I can be missing something, it's been awhile since I've done optics.

fortyseven 3y ago
I was just thinking to make ALL the glass the same tint, regardless of specialty.

MrYellowP 3y ago

You can't know how much it improves in a year, two, five.

Johnny555 3y ago

>For the people kinda worried: this is a highly specialized piece of glass that is extremely complicated to manufacture at present and must, due to the laws of thermodynamics, not be 100% transparent. It's not going to allow surveillance through existing glass installations in any form If you're worried that your Airbnb host is going to use it to spy on you (which was mentioned in the article), unless you already scrutinize every nail hole, photo frame, electrical appliance, electrical outlets, smoke detector, etc, this doesn't open up a new vulnerability. Pinhole cameras with a lens as small as 2mm are already readily available and cheap, no ones going to use an expensive "window camera" to spy on you when they already have so many other options. Perhaps those that fear government surveillance or other well funded adversaries may have cause for concern, but few of us are in that category.

theyinwhy 3y ago
Pinhole cameras by definition do not have lenses and are known since 500 BCE or 1893 if you need a recording unit ;)
- Johnny555 3y ago
  Language and technology has evolved a bit since 1893: https://www.google.com/search?q=pinhole+surveillance+camera https://www.google.com/search?q=pinhole+surveillance+camera
  - theyinwhy 3y ago
    But does the use of the word pinhole make any sense if it is not a pinhole but a "3.7mm" lense? Pinhole camera is a specific term used for more than a century now. It is well defined. Now someone from marketing thought "let's call our small camera a pinhole camera". Sry, but that is not a pinhole camera. That camera also exists since ages and is called an endoscope camera. Words are important in IT and if everyone would just think a bit more about terms they use we would have way less friction with business and less business logic bugs.
    - 3y ago

ijhuygft776 3y ago

> It's not going to allow surveillance through existing glass installations in any form, just possibly new ones if there's room for the support equipment and through the use of 4-5 digit piles of cash. Total surveillance is just a matter of time...

WhackyIdeas 3y ago
I agree. I had this worrying idea (realisation..?) that one day, maybe triple digit years away, maybe sooner, that tiny cameras and mics the size of grains of salt will be everywhere. They will cost nothing to produce, be self-charging, interconnected to each other and created to ‘reduce crime’ or ‘make you safer’. And in the same way as forever chemicals, you can’t get rid of them. Trillions of them, in fields, the ground. Spreading around stuck to your shoes, on your car tires. Just a crazy idea, but I think that if they could make that happen today then they would. And that part is the main point - There is no limit to surveillance anymore. I live in the UK, that realisation is in my face every day. Can’t even take a trip to Tesco without being run through facial recognition. There is no care for the concept of privacy anymore. All the richest companies in the world don’t make their money from caring about our privacy.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Politicians and high ranking unelected officials also will want privacy so truly omnipresent surveillance would be concomitant with jamming and obfuscation technologies. There’d just be endless arms race.
  - WhackyIdeas 3y ago
    There will come a time when everyone will face the panopticon though. It’ll be unavoidable, like forever chemicals. I suppose that will be when the machines take over!!
- akamoonknight 3y ago
  I believe I read a science fiction book around this topic. Postsingular by Rudy Rucker I believe, related to nanotechnology. Can't remember most of it, but delved a little into how it affects relationships re: every thing being visible always to everyone. Not sure I'd entirely recommend it, but still interesting to see the thoughts and outcomes others come up with in regard to these types of potential technological changes.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

JCharante 3y ago

> and through the use of 4-5 digit piles of cash. 5 figures doesn't sound like much for an organized crime network

kristjansson 3y ago
Where could someone surreptitiously place a wildly expensive pane of glass they couldn’t already put an $20 hidden camera?
AceyMan 3y ago
I read it as the thickness of the deck of bills (thousands or more) so if they are 20s or 100s, that's be some serious funding.

ryukoposting 3y ago

> Add in the fact that your IPhone has mac randomization but every other device you own including your car's TPMS doesn't. The truly pathetic thing is that virtually all of these devices could use RPA but don't, because nobody remembered to flip that flag from "n" to "y"

Log_out_ 3y ago

Oh tempo oh rex moores

bradknowles 3y ago

There are some places where a not-completely 90% transparent piece of glass might not raise too much suspicion, but it could be more difficult to retrofit with a more traditional "pinhole" style spycam. Like the wall of a shower stall, which you would expect to be less than 100% transparent. I do think this threat model is less likely, however. What I think is more likely is a Minority Report style system where there are pervasive cameras everywhere, constantly scanning your face, etc.... Maybe not constantly scanning your retinas and identifying you that way, but facial recognition alone would be more than enough. Either way, once you're recognized, you could be easily tracked silently, or you could be called out publicly by a nearby display.