A future where the smartphone screens with the scratch resistant Corning Gorilla Glass protection will be laden with sensors to monitor your temperature or blood sugar levels will soon be a reality, claims a new report.
Canadian Researchers at Polytechnique Montreal and scientists at Corning have come up with the first laser-written light-guiding systems, described in the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal published Wednesday.
The team has successfully embedded the Gorilla Glass used in smartphones with “layer upon layer of sensors.” They have developed two new completely transparent systems – a conventional temperature sensor and a new system using optical waveguides for authenticating a smartphone.
The temperature sensor is based on Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) device and deduces the temperature as glass deforms under heat and as light passes through the waveguide. The sensor was laser-etched into the Corning Gorilla Glass. The teams have used optical waveguides, funnelling photons through the glass channels, for the resulting see-through sensors.
Raman Kashyap, a professor of electrical engineering at the Polytechnique Montreal in Canada, said that they are “actively looking to partner with industry to exploit this technology,” and added that manufacturers should possibly begin building this technology within a year into the smartphones with “focused development.”
According to the researchers, this new technology “could also eventually allow computing devices to be embedded into any glass surface, such as windows or tabletops, creating the transparent touchscreens seen in movies like Avatar and Iron Man.”
Kashyap and his team have reportedly developed a force sensor through independent research in an effort towards the development of transparent sensors. However, loss of transparency can be ruled out, as the waveguides are laser-etched, allowing researches to stack it over one another, again and again.
The researchers claimed that it took only an average of 10 seconds to laser-etch the waveguides in three dimensions in the Gorilla Glass, which reportedly yielded the “lowest-measured loss value, the fastest fabrication times, and the longest, high-quality waveguides of any glass.”
While the team includes Ming-Jun Li, a researcher at Corning, there isn’t any word from the company about the implementation of new technology in the future glasses.
