Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a special coating that prevents the lenses in glasses from fogging up. Apparently, not all heroes wear capes.
This has been a problem since the advent of optical lenses, but it’s fair to say it reached a peak during the pandemic when everyone wearing glasses found out the hard way that most face masks vent your breath up towards your eyes. You’d think someone would have fixed this by now, but it’s harder than you might guess.
The difficulty of the problem is evident by the lack of current solutions. You can wipe your glasses off when they fog up or… well, that’s pretty much it. There are anti-fog sprays and special lens coatings that help, but those only minimize the problem.
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You don’t have to be a physicist to understand that the best solution would be heat. Glasses fog when warm vapor comes into contact with their cooler lenses. This temperature fluctuation causes the vapor to turn into moisture, and your glasses turn foggy because they’re wet.
Unfortunately, heating up glasses isn’t a simple task. Using traditional methods, you’d have to find a transparent material that can be heated externally, develop a power source for the material, and make sure there’s no danger of overheating the lenses or heating the frames. That’s a pretty tall order, especially when you consider that any added bulk or weight will increase the wearer’s discomfort.
The ETH Zurich team got around these engineering problems by taking a different approach. They developed a special gold coating that uses solar energy to produce heat. It doesn’t require a battery or wires or any other components aside from the coating itself.