IRL Glasses Block All the Screens Around You | Hacker News Reader

IRL Glasses Block All the Screens Around You

wired.com

206 pointsAndrewKemendo111 comments

You probably wouldn't want to drive in these sunglasses. Normal polarized glasses reduce glare reflecting from damp roads, etc, by blocking horizontally polarized light, as this reflected light is strongly polarized.

The polarization on screens, including the one in your car satnav, is usually oriented so that someone wearing polarized glasses can see it. Rotate the polarization on the sunglasses, and you won't be able to see the satnav, and you'll get maximum glare off the road because the sunglasses will block much of the ambient light, but almost none of the road reflections.

I think these are wavelength based filters vice polarized filters (see below). However, if they are wavelength based you might have a hard time determining whether a stoplight is red or green (yellow would be OK), so I agree - probably not a good idea to drive with.

If you look at Kickstarter:

By flattening and rotating the polarized lens 90 degrees, light emitted by LCD/LED screens is blocked, making it look like the TV or computer in front of you is off.

These won't work on phones nor Billboards.

These may well work on some (cheap?) phones, I've had phones not display properly through polarized sunglasses before.

They would work for sure with my LG G4.

Sadly, I can not use the phone on landscape while wearing polarized sun glasses. Something very annoying when trying to take a photo on a sunny day.

They’ll also be damned disturbing if you tilt your head at all, and screens start fading in and out of existence.

Exactly as disturbing as regular sunglasses, not very disturbing at all.

No normal sun glasses doesn't have any phasing they are just tinted.

Sorry, I obviously meant regular polarized sunglasses.

They certainly would work on most phones in one of the valid orientations.

Yeah, most phones are not OLED (yet?)

I don't think that's true. Apple has been the major holdout on OLED for a while, and they're now into their second year of using it.

The vast majority of people don't have a year-old phone, never mind a flagship model.

That's true, but the Galaxy S series has used AMOLED since it was introduced in 2010.[0] Looking in more detail my guess is it's not majority market share but it's definitely significant.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_series

Granted, my 2011 Nokia N9 also had an OLED screen. But they became unfashionable for several years due to (then) poor color rendering (although their contrast, naturally, was and is top notch). Currently they've been making a comeback.

Perhaps by LED they're referring to LED-backlit LCD displays. There's pretty much full coverage of the visible spectrum across different LED types, so the only way to block them is with completely opaque lenses.

> Perhaps by LED they're referring to LED-backlit LCD displays.

That's conventional for how LED-backlit LCD displays are marketed to consumers.

That isn't how polarization works. It isn't about the spectrum it is about how it travels or is reflected in a more uniform way (normally horizontal. So if you block out horizontal light you get rid of glare or in the case of panels you stop seeing the screen.

Right, well we aren't talking about polarization since LEDs don't emit polarized light, so you'd need notch filters to block the wavelengths LEDs emit, but the notch required to block all LEDs would be entire visible spectrum.

No idea why this was downvoted - the article explicitly says "Their IRL Glasses, which launched on Kickstarter this week, block the wavelengths of light that comes from LED and LCD screens." This implies wavelength-based vice polarized filters. More halfassed Wired reporting I guess.

I love you too, HN.

A bigger concern is that, if it blocks all LED wavelengths, it may also block brake lights of some vehicles.

It does not block wavelengths. It blocks light polarized in certain directions which may be of any wavelength.

Brake lights will most certainly not be polarized and so they will be dimmed by the same amount as most other objects emitting/reflecting non-polarized light.

Take in mind any glasses that reduce amount of light can be dangerous if used in poor lighting conditions (and yes, this includes those that purport to improve contrast).

hey lmilcin! I'm with the team behind the glasses. It sounds like you might know a thing or too about optics. We're looking for engineers and researchers that can help us solve the hard problem of blocking OLEDs for our next product. A lot of people think it’s impossible but we’re willing to give it our best shot!

Any chance you’re someone that can help?

Hi! I may have a tip for you. OLEDs emit at very specific wavelengths due to materials being used and there are very few materials that make for majority of displays. If you can create lenses that would selectively block very specific wavelengths (probably using same chemicals) then OLED displays would be dark or greatly attenuated and everything else that emits diffuse light would be only slightly attenuated (only small part of the continuous spectrum would be blocked at the specific wavelength).

Thanks for the tip! This is super interesting. We're experimenting with notch filters to block RGB. Is that what you're talking about here?

The Kickstarter has a postscript that says not to wear them while driving.

A bigger notice mentioning why you shouldn't would be better, though.

Do you mean "why" as in the science mentioned above, or some other clarification or the nature of the harm? What would you have it say?

I ask because it seems to me that the simplest possible warnings are the most effective for the average consumer.

"____ aren't intended for use while driving, because they can make road glare much more prominent than regular sunglasses."

They could have circular polarizing filters on top of the satnav screens

Won't these glasses stop working if your head isn't perfectly aligned with the screen?

This is absolutely brilliant:

“As for the design? Cash says they modeled the glasses after the 1988 film, They Live, in which a magic pair of sunglasses exposes the subliminal messaging in advertisements. When viewed through the special lenses, billboards revealed messages like OBEY, CONSUME, CONFORM, placed there by aliens to surreptitiously control humanity. It struck Cash as the perfect metaphor—just replace the alien overlords in the film with the mind-hijacking companies of Silicon Valley.“

Not all the screens: in my office, everyone has multiple monitors, and about half of them are in portrait orientation. They aren't special portrait monitors, they're normal monitors rotated tau/4 radians. So their plane of polarisation is perpendicular to that of the landscape monitors.

I know this because i put on a pair of sunglasses while sat at my desk, and wondered why i could still see my email, but not my IDE.

I had that happen with my polarized sunglasses at a restaurant that had their menus displayed on big vertically-rotated screens behind the counters. I kept looking around for paper menus and didn't realize there was even anything displaying on the screens until I took my glasses off.

Today I learned that tau/4 radians is a much smarter sounding way of writing 90*. Of course it takes up more space, and isn’t any more precise, so I’ll probably never remember or choose to use it. At least I won’t have to google it again the next time someone smarter than me writes it!

"90*" is unrecognizable. "90 degrees" is recognizable, but takes up more space than "tau/4". "𝜏/4" takes only 3 characters of course, same as "90°".

> "90 degrees" is recognizable, but takes up more space than "tau/4"

You forgot the unit on one of them, it's "tau/4 radians" and not "tau/4", which make it longer than "90 degrees".

"𝜏/4 rad" is still longer than "90°" too.

EDIT: I just found out that there is also a shorter symbol for rad which is the superscript c, but I don't know how to write it here and it's still longer. Wikipedia also say that it's rarely used because it's too similar to the degree sign.

how about a new single character constant that encodes tau/4 radians?

How about Ϟʹ – the ancient greek symbol for 90 :)

Who reads Ancient Greek, and why use two characters? Just use ∟ or ⦜ (Unicode “Right Angle” (U+221F), respectively “Right Angle Variant With Square” (U+299C). Don’t confuse either with ⌞, “Bottom Left Corner” (U+231E))

Tau is a Greek character, which is why I jokingly suggested this. Also, the above _is_ a single character, however, your suggestion is much more practical. The one with the square makes more sense since it may be ambiguous otherwise (90 or 270 degrees)

long after edit: I guess it's not technically one character!

Radians is a natural unit. You don’t need to specify it if you’re talking about rotations.

It is like how you need to specify % if talking percent but don’t need any units if talking perunum.

That's exactly why we come to HN, right?

If you want to save space, there is no need to mention the amount of rotation. This is sufficient:

> They aren't special portrait monitors, they're normal monitors rotated.

The amount of rotation is implied by "normal" and "portrait".

> As for the design? Cash says they modeled the glasses after the 1988 film, They Live, in which a magic pair of sunglasses exposes the subliminal messaging in advertisements.

I have come here to chew bubblegum and block screens, and I'm all out of bubblegum.

I've had the same reaction, "They live" was an unforgettable movie. These glasses appear to have the same design as well

Nice, I didn't read the article but immediately that movie came to mind.

The alley fight scene is one of the funniest scenes ever made. I watch clips of it occasionally and it never fails to make me laugh. What is remarkable about it though is that it's also chock full of cultural commentary.

As a child of the 90s, I always thought that was a Duke Nukem quote. Gonna watch this movie.

You need to watch it with a solid understanding that ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper (the lead actor) was a professional WWF wrestler - often a heel - who regularly got beaten and beat other people for entertainment (no judgement, I was a big fan). Puts his acting chops in a whole new light!

So all they did was take some film from Steelcase and fix it on sunglasses? I'm curious what they are doing to 'productize' this other than just choosing some cliche sunglasses to stick the film to. Also curious how much the film costs, since I'm interested in making myself a pair..

Edit: you can request a free sample of the film here: https://info.designtex.com/casper

You could just rip the film out of an old LCD screen and rotate it 90 degrees.

This is the same trick behind “LCD privacy glasses” which does the opposite of the IRL glasses.

https://youtu.be/zL_HAmWQTgA

> You could just rip the film out of an old LCD screen and rotate it 90 degrees.

At first, I also thought this was just a linearly polarized filter rotated orthogonal to the polarized emission of (typical) LCD panels, which would be far from new. However, that doesn't explain how the film would block an LED billboard which are unpolarized. The article isn't clear if their talking about LED billboards or LED backlit panels, the latter are still essentially LCD panels and thus must be polarized. If the latter, then I agree with you this is as far from revolutionary as you can get.

The article does say that the film selectively filters out wavelengths of light, rather than selective polarization. So, what I assume the film is actually doing is playing off the fact that display manufactuers strive for saturated color emission from the RGB subpixels. The film is a "notch filter" with three stopping bands (in the red, green, and blue) portions of the visible spectrum.

Pixels don't emit single wavelengths (e.g. 555 nm for green). If they did, that would imply pure saturation. Lasers are virtually purely saturated, but even then they generally a band (ableit extremely narrow) of wavelengths. Display pixels, even highly saturated emit in a band.

However, LCD's and the typical high quality inorganic LED's used in billboards emit relatively saturated ligh (e.g. ~30-50nm wide bands), and are able to do so largely with the help of dye-based absorbing band-pass filters (basically the opposite of notch filters) that only allow a few wanelengths to pass through while others are absorbed and radiated as heat.

OLEDs on the other hand emit specific wavelengths of light and therefore do not need/use color filters. However, OLEDs also have inherently wide emission spectra (perhaps ~100nm) due to the fact that it is difficult to finely tune the exciton (excited particles that emit light in OLEDs) energy levels to produce highly saturated emission. Interestingly, Quantim Dot LEDs that function similar to OLEDs, are more saturated that OLEDs because it's easier to control the size of quantum dots which directly relates to emitted wavelength, alas, these LEDs are typically only used in LCD backlights (I'm not sure why).

The point of all this is that you could easily design an optical film with 3 R, G, and B notches of ~50nm or so, which would block almost all light from any display with saturated pixel emission. However, less saturated OLED light would still bleed through. You can't really widen the notch filter bands too much because then you start blocking every band in the visible spactrum, meaning less ambient light can pass through, until ultimately you can't see through the film at all.

Anyhoo, that's why I suspect this is notch filter film vice polarized filter.

The article actually says that they achieved the same effect using polarised sunglasses, rotated 90 degrees. The stuff about wavelengths is just bad science writing, and I suspect that when they say 'blocks LEDs' they mean 'blocks LED backlit LCD monitors'.

It pretty clearly states that the first prototype used a film that selectively filters out just the frequencies of light used by RGB displays, but that they're doing the production run using the much, much cheaper horizontal polarization trick. It wasn't bad science writing, because that film really does exist. There are in fact a wide variety of these films for every conceivable use. The most common might well be the hydrogen-alpha film that every astronomer has used.

hey db48x! I'm with the team behind the glasses. It sounds like you might know a thing or too about optics. We're looking for engineers and researchers that can help us solve the hard problem of blocking OLEDs for our next product. A lot of people think it’s impossible but we’re willing to give it our best shot!

Any chance you’re someone that can help?

hey mojomark! I'm with the team behind the glasses. It sounds like you might know a thing or too about optics. We're looking for engineers and researchers that can help us solve the hard problem of blocking OLEDs for our next product. A lot of people think it’s impossible but we’re willing to give it our best shot!

Any chance you’re someone that can help?

In the end most products are "just taking something and putting it into something else". What they are probably doing is making the glasses actually look good, not like a pair of 3D glasses from the theater or like a pair of glasses with pieces of film stuck on them.

> So all they did was take some film from Steelcase and fix it on sunglasses?

For the prototype, yes. If you read the article, you learn that they are using their own rotated polarized lenses for production.

I did read the article, but somehow missed that important detail, thanks.

From my reading, the sunglasses are created more as an artistic or philosophical statement than as a serious product.

Yeah, but they're not that expensive. I doubt DIY sunglasses would look great.

They're $50.

>Right now, their lenses can block light emitted from LCD and LED screens, but not OLED screens.

I think the only solution for selectively blocking nonpolarized light sources would be AR glasses. I don't think they'd ever be able to achieve that with simple filters as they appear to be doing now - although with advances in materials who knows.

>Right now, their lenses can block light emitted from LCD and LED screens, but not OLED screens.

Wired is saying "right now" as if with further development OLED screens could also be blocked. That's the typical misleading crap that makes me hate Wired.

It says so in their Kickstarter page, Wired is just reporting on that.

Whether Wired should have pressed them more on the topic, I'm not sure.

They don't need to press, they just need to ask someone on staff who has a basic knowledge of display technologies. Not doing even a tiny amount of fact checking is a bad look.

There are two fact there, neither of which needs further checking. One is that the current glasses don't block OLED screens. The other is that the company owners hope to find a way to block more screens.

I agree that there's reason to think that hope is unlikely to be fulfilled. Talking to someone on staff won't help, though. What you want is for the reporter to interview a few different actual experts on display technologies and optical filtering and have at least one of them say something that dismisses the hope.

From the writer's perspective, I'm not sure what that would add to the article. Wired's whole shtick has been excitement about the possibilities of technology, often at a level that borders on technoutopianism. And smart experts rarely make sweeping statements about what's totally impossible; they're much more likely to say that it can't be done with this technology or that they think it will be a hard problem to solve. So it's not going to be a compelling quote, and it'll be a fair bit of work to get.

> hope to find a way

There is a clear difference between wishing for the impossible, and having plans for the future.

> actual experts

To explain how polarized light works? No, I absolutely do not want quotes. I want statements of basic fact.

> they're much more likely to say that it can't be done with this technology

How about this: Any technology for blocking OLED would be a completely different thing from what they used to make these glasses. It's not an improvement, it's a replacement. It's misleading to use terms like "right now" to talk about such a situation.

> I want statements of basic fact.

Journalists inserting their own non-expert views in articles doesn't generally sound like a great idea to me. And it's something they're trained to not do.

> Any technology for blocking OLED would be a completely different thing from what they used to make these glasses.

Yes, that's the kind of statement that they could get from an expert. But it's not clear to me that it improves the article more than marginally, not to a level that justifies the work time and publishing delay needed to get the statement.

Does it help the person who might buy these glasses? Will it be exciting to the kind of person who reads gee-whiz articles about tech? Does it enhance the enjoyment of the reader who likes the cultural and artistic aspects? No, no, and no. It also doesn't help people who already understand polarized light; to them it is, as you say, a basic fact.

That kind of thing might be appropriate if this were an article about somebody trying to build a serious business whose long-term survival depended on them blocking all screens. And if this were some place like the WSJ, that was actually trying to do serious business reporting. But since this is a 700-word light piece on a cute novelty, an object meant to provoke discussion, I'm not seeing the point.

Glasses with optical notch filters already exist [0]. So it's not inconceivable that glasses that block R, G, and B from at least some common LEDs could be built.

[0] https://enchroma.com

I'm no optics expert, but considering the large width of the emission spectra of LEDs (https://www.comsol.com/blogs/calculating-the-emission-spectr...) and OLEDs (https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/exploiting-the-poten...), I'd say it's physically impossible to block their light to any acceptable degree of specificity.

I am no expert, either, but it seems you could create material that will attenuate OLED-originating light much more than other light. Ie. these glasses would not be completely transparent, they would be somewhat grey but would be much more opaque for OLED light than normal continuous spectrum. Even with polarized glasses you don't block all light, you block some and due to proximity to much more luminous sources (as seen through glasses) it appears dark.

Optical notch filters do exist, but LEDs are not notch emitters[0].

[0]https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/149683/do-st...

hey dreamcompiler! I'm with the team behind the glasses. It sounds like you might know a thing or too about optics. We're looking for engineers and researchers that can help us solve the hard problem of blocking OLEDs for our next product. A lot of people think it’s impossible but we’re willing to give it our best shot!

Any chance you’re someone that can help?

A real-life adblocker -- yes please!

Kind of like how anti-sense RNA works.

They could call it anti-adsense!

hey newman8r! I'm with the team behind the glasses. It sounds like you might know a thing or too about optics. We're looking for engineers and researchers that can help us solve the hard problem of blocking OLEDs for our next product. A lot of people think it’s impossible but we’re willing to give it our best shot!

Any chance you’re someone that can help?

I think AR glasses, or an app for existing/future AR glasses is an easy solution, but maybe not stylish enough yet. I'm not an optical engineer though, just a dev who happens to knows a little bit about physics (like, hobbyist level).

Congrats on your kickstarter by the way - you guys know your market.

Off-topic but I sincerely hope Steve Blew, and Ivan Cash don't form a company that takes after their last names.

A shame Steve Jobs isn't around to join in.

His name is Scott Blew, not Steve. Regardless, that's such a formidable observation, and such a coincidence as well.

You're right, they should concatenate their whole names instead.

Pretty damn cool.

Sort of reminds me of the sunglasses from the 1988 John Carpenter film: "They Live".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w

Exact same though. The designer MUST have had that in mind with the shape/aesthetic he went for.

If you go to the kickstarter, they confirm that's where the design came from.

The article mentions that the film served as their design inspiration.

"As for the design? Cash says they modeled the glasses after the 1988 film, They Live, in which a magic pair of sunglasses exposes the subliminal messaging in advertisements."

He talks about this in the article.

Only 'revolutionary' if you never owned polarised sunglasses and never rotated them in front of a LCD (or similar screens with polarised filters):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQCJ1HOdePU

Nobody said they're revolutionary.

This reminds me of Limor Freid's (ladyada) Media-Sensitive Glasses: http://www.ladyada.net/media/pub/thesis.pdf

I came here to post this also.

Prior art.

I have a cheap pair of polarised aviators I got from eBay that have the same effect as these glasses. I'm guessing when they were made, the lens material was oriented wrong during cutting -- vertical instead of horizontal, and thus cutting out screens. I like wearing them, though I don't entirely trust them as sunglasses. And when I get a call, I have to lift them to be able to see my phone's screen.

I'm still waiting for my order of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses.

almost..... but not quite https://hackaday.com/2018/10/06/challenge-your-perception-of...

Anti Screen Slaver (villain from The Incredibles 2) glasses have been invented!

How long before LCD is obsolete in consumer devices? I've heard a few estimates, haven't looked into it though.

When someone figures out an LED screen that doesn't somehow take more power than the backlight on an LCD, and makes it cheaper than dirt.

Probably decades, considering the difficulty of making large OLED displays. This article buys into the marketing propaganda of calling LED backlit LCDs just "LEDs", but the only real non-organic LED displays are the big outdoor ones. "LED" displays in the deceptive marketing sense are still LCDs.

Plus current OLED screens are the new plasma in that they are the expensive high end that wears out quicker. Lower voltages help the lifetime at least.

Quite some time unless we develop a radically cheaper and more reliable way to develop OLED screens at scale.

Does this block cellphone screens? Would love to use these at concert venues.

as long as it's not OLED like new iPhones.

fun idea but meh... it's just polarized glasses, presumably using at least a couple of polarizing filters to block multiple directions of light rather than only one.

These would also block streetlights though, with them being predominantely LEDs nowadays.

I don't think streetlights have a polarizing filter on them.

There are a lot of these comments as the result of bad science writing copy on the wired article.

The wonders of HN: Yesterday I posted a link to their kickstarter and it didn't get a single upvote :)

It's all about timing.

It's uh... pretty obvious that occasionally the mods will kick stuff they like to the front page to mix it up a bit. If you observe the new page you can occasionally see them do it.

And if this ever takes off, someone is going to start a kickstarter, selling depolarizing sheets to put in front of LCD screens.

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