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New Material For Fast-Change Sunglasses, Data Storage

Posted by kdawson on from the epileptics-need-not-apply dept.

sciencehabit writes "'Researchers have developed a material that almost instantaneously (30 ms) changes from clear to dark blue when exposed to ultraviolet light, and it just as quickly reverts to clear when the light is turned off. The new material, one of a class called photochromics, could be useful in optical data storage as well as in super-fancy sunglasses.'" A comment to the article notes some of the potential dangers of quick-change sunglasses.

4 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Slow Memory by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    30ms is pretty slow by memory standards.

    Could you imagine a CD burner which takes 30ms per bit?

    It'll need to get a LOT faster to be used in any kind of processing or storage medium.

    1. Re:Slow Memory by erayd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      30ms is pretty slow by memory standards.

      Could you imagine a CD burner which takes 30ms per bit?

      It'll need to get a LOT faster to be used in any kind of processing or storage medium.

      Who says you have to write things serially? Admittedly write latency would suck, but you can still get a phenomenal throughput if you write a whole bunch of bits in parallel.

      --
      Forget world peace, bring on -1 pointless
  2. Something missing? by OpenSourced · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nowhere in the article they mention how the data is going to be 'stored'. If you need to be constantly bathing the material with UV light just to keep it dark, there is not much storage going on, IMO. Of course there might be missing data from the article, but they should explain a bit more.

    --
    Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
  3. The eye adapts slowly by oneirophrenos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's all good and well, but the eye doesn't adapt to changes in lighting as fast as this material does. What if the lens (and the eye) were subjected to a bright light from the angle of, say, 70 degrees? This wouldn't be blinding, because it would not hit the area of high acuity vision on the retina, but would nevertheless cause the lens to dim. So we would have a situation where the light hitting the retina would be significantly reduced, but the eye would still be adapted to conditions of relative brightness. We would effectively be blind (think of going to dark indoors on a bright sunny day).