a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  4731 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: CES - Samsung's Smart Window
Problems:

1) Contrast. It seems to look nice with a carefully-controlled backlight behind it. How does it look with a Southern California sunset behind it?

2) Black levels. If your "shades" are liquid crystal, they're about as opaque as a pair of Ray Bans. Trust me - turn a light on inside your house after dark and your neighbors will be able to watch you browse facebook on your "window."

3) Ergonomics. Yeah, it always looks cool in movies, but computers in movies go "beepity beepity beepity PANG" too and as we all learned in 1989, that shit gets really old really quick. "Move your whole goddamn arm" UIs are repetitive strain injuries on a stick. There's a reason mouse pads are seldom over 9" wide, even though screens are seldom smaller than 12" - the less you move, the more efficient you are. Swinging your arm around like Polly Powerpoint looks awesome in videos but sucks ass when you have to do it just to check the weather.

4) That big, heinous "no touch" symbol plainly visible below the product demo leads me to believe this is pretty far off.

Know those groovy "turn dark magically" windows you see in Blade Runner? They do exist. A friend's lab bought some. They cost $1000/sf just two years ago. And their cycle time is really fuckin' slow. Yeah, welding goggles work but they're a couple hundred bucks for 8 square inches of glass - and they don't do gray levels.

They sure as fuck don't do color.