Glass Media
an ambition achieved
The aspiration has been long held to be able to apply addressable LED technology to transparent glass so that it can become an integrated display, using the envelope of a building itself.
There have been false starts and promises unfulfilled.
We have seen very low power LED and transparent circuitry laminated between two panes of glass. A composite product may be suitable for indoor use but because of the limitations in the LED laminating process, commercial structural glass panels are not produced for building facades. Even if this limitation could be overcome, the LED is not bright enough and fatally, if the LED fails, the entire pane of glass would have to be replaced. Not a prospect the owner of a commercial building would entertain.
We have seen LED in linear format, installed in-between the two panes that make up double glazing panels, referred to as ‘integrated glass units’ (IGUs). The brightness issue can be solved but the fatal issues of maintainability remain. A failure of any of the integrated LED requires that the entire IGU must be replaced.
illumination Physics has commercialised a practical LED product that can transform Vision Glass into a Media Wall and still maintain a very high degree of transparency when viewed from the inside.
IP Glass Media is a unique LED media product designed to be applied on the inside of the vision glass panels of a building so that the external architecture is unaffected.
The genesis of this product is almost a decade old but the HSBC 150th Anniversary project in Hong Kong saw the ultimate development of IP Glass Media and the creation of the largest RGB media display in Hong Kong.
iIllumination Physics’ Glass Media is comprised of a linear LED strip just 12mm wide. The strips are attached to the inside of the glass with a special 3M adhesive process with a service life of more than a decade.
The interval between Glass Media strips can be varied infinitely depending on the typical viewing distance and hence the resolution required. Our recent project for HSBC made use of strips placed at 200mm centres which were the perfect horizontal pitch for typical viewing from 100m to 4 km with a transparency of 94%.
Unlike its precursors, illumination Physics’ Glass Media can be easily serviced and has no impact on the building envelope.
Custom lengths are produced to suit each application perfectly.
illumination Physics offers content creation for animated displays or content management as required so that the display is optimised.
