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These smart windows turn sunlight into what?

Answer: Wi-Fi.

Floor-to-ceiling windows in an empty office room looking out over a city with sunlight shining in.
Shutterstock/voyata
A team at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia is working on developing windows that could use sunlight to generate Wi-Fi.

There are already systems out there that can transmit data through flickering light patterns, but they use artificial light. This system will do it with sunlight, modulating it as it shines through the specialized window glass. They do this with dual-cell liquid crystal shutters in the smart glass, which rapidly change the polarity of the sunlight passing through.

Additionally, the team believes this system could be powered just by a small solar panel, as the shutters use only 1 watt of electricity compared to the 5 to 20 watts of traditional Wi-Fi routers. As it is, they estimate that their system would be capable of transmitting 16 kilobits per second, but they feel there’s a lot of room for improvement there.

“We are now ordering the necessary hardware for a testbed prototype implementation,” said associate professor Basem Shihada, the project’s lead scientist. “We would like to increase the data rates from kilobits to mega- and gigabits per second.”