High-tech brings its smarts to buildings

OLIVE BRANCH, Miss. — In a cavernous manufacturing plant about 20 miles from Memphis, a vision of the future is humming away.

A California start-up called View, which has raised a whopping $500 million from investors including Corning, General Electric and Khosla Ventures, is making high-tech windows that have the potential to bring to buildings what high-resolution touchscreens did for smartphones.

View’s windows eliminate glare, change hue, moderate internal temperature — and at some point, could show entirely different views of the outside world — via a process that  uses a pane of glass sprayed with electrochromic material, which alters light transmission.

The result is smart glass that increases energy efficiency and promises better worker productivity, via technology accessed through an app.

"When you look at smart glass, the only smart surface we saw was on our phones," says Ben Bajarin, an analyst for Creative Strategies who follows the industry. "Now, we believe consumers are moving toward an age where smart glass can do almost anything — for example, project images of the sun on your windows during a rainy day or viewing data on the window."

While elements of the technology have been around on a smaller scale, such as car windows, View is the first company to commercially produce such glass at a large scale. SageGlass, a Minnesota-based maker of electrochromic glass, is perhaps View's best-known competitor.

Smart, or dynamic, glass is turning out to be a key component in the connected building market that some peg at up to $1 trillion. View estimates the smart glass market could be worth an estimated $100 billion worldwide.

Growth is tied to advances of technology and changes in taste. As architects increasingly incorporate glass into the designs of commercial and residential structures, the importance of managing light has magnified. Huge lobbies with windows can heat up or freeze a building's residents, driving up energy costs; smart glass can regulate temperatures and moderate the intensity of light coming in.

Those who work in natural light are 6% to 15% more productive, yet 59% of the window area is covered by blinds or shades, according to the Urban Green Council.

"The skin (exterior) of these beautiful buildings look like broken teeth" with half-drawn blinds, says Robert Rozbicki, chief technology officer at View

The expected benefits have led to a jump in installations for Milipitas, Calif.-based View.

Its pieces of high-tech glass are installed in 200 buildings, with 100 on the way. Blue-tinted windows welcome visitors to Methodist Healthcare in Olive Branch, SMU's student hall rotunda, the W Hotel in San Francisco and CenturyLink Technology Center in Monroe, La.

Some 30,000 square feet of View windows will adorn Overstock.com's peace-sign shaped, $100 million headquarters in Salt Lake City when it opens later this year. Shipments and bookings of dynamic glass for View rose to 800,000 square feet in 2015, from less than 100,000 in 2012.

At the Collision tech conference in New Orleans this week, company representatives spread the word.

“Three years ago, it was a concept,” View CEO Rao Mulpuri, who was not at Collision, said in a phone interview. “The game for us now is to scale up production.”

MAKING SMART GLASS

About a half-hour drive from Memphis and FedEx headquarters, View’s 300,000-square-foot sits squat in a business park surrounded by similarly huge plants. Inside, thousands of pieces of glass are cut and their edges smoothly ground by a team of workers operating machines. The slices of glass are tempered – heated and rapidly cooled – to strengthen them.

USA TODAY was the first mainstream media organization granted access to the plant for an hour-long tour. Glass is prepped to a pristine surface before it is coated with a thin layer of material developed by View. The coated glass goes through a rigorous horse-shaped assembly line, where it is compressed into a window, wires are inserted and it is sealed. The resulting window is laminated to make it sturdier for use on skyscrapers, and then tested by machine and human eyes for any flaws. Those cracks, or halos, are fixed with a laser.

The process, monitored in a control room on several computer screens, produces pieces of glass up to six feet wide by 10 feet high.

BLADE RUNNER WINDOWS

The long game is the stuff of science fiction: Windows that gave you views of another world.

Buzz about this future was strong during the 1964-5 New York World's Fair, best remembered for celebrating the nascent Space Age of technology. Amid breathless whispers of personal computers and modems, an obscure technology called electrochromism promised smart windows.

Glimpses of that future appeared in movies such as Blade Runner (1982), Minority Report (2002) and Iron Man (2008).

"I was always optimistic about this technology... but it went through various levels of product development," says Dr. Satyen Deb, considered a pioneer of electrochromism who is now an adviser to View.

Indeed, the concept proved elusive to reproduce in large panes of glass: The first commercial shipment, by another company, did not occur until the late 1990s.

View's first iteration — it was founded as Soladigm in Santa Rosa, Calif., in 2007 — thought it had an answer. But after fits and starts, it was renamed View in 2012, a few years after Mulpuri joined the now 400-person company.

To get there, big changes happened at a very small scale.

"We see this as a big trend. We are standing on the backs on advances in the semiconductor and display industries,” Mulpuri said.

Follow USA TODAY San Francisco Bureau Chief @jswartz from the Collision conference in New Orleans this week.