The centerpiece of Apple Inc.’s new headquarters is a massive, ring-shaped office overflowing with panes of glass, a testament to the company’s famed design-obsessed aesthetic.
There’s been one hiccup since it opened last year: Apple employees keep smacking into the glass.
Surrounding the Cupertino, California-based building are 45-foot tall curved panels of safety glass. Inside are work spaces, dubbed “pods,” also made with a lot of glass. Apple staff are often glued to the iPhones they helped popularize. That’s resulted in repeated cases of distracted employees walking into the panes, according to people familiar with the incidents.
Some staff started to stick Post-It notes on the glass doors to mark their presence.
They should have used a birefringent material*. Looking at 90 degrees it would be transparent but as you approach it your peripheral vision would perceive its presence as the refractive index changed. Or a higher refractive index material might work. Higher RI = more reflective. I would have to be lit from both sides to be effective. Won't help walking and texting though. Nothing helps that.
rubato wrote: I would have to be lit from both sides to be effective.
Well, you said it.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
Clever boy spotted a typing error. The effed up eyesight and crappy typing produces a lot of those.
When light goes from one material to another the difference in refractive index determines how much light is reflected backwards at the interface. The larger the difference the more reflection. The RI air is 1 the RI of many of our glass-based materials is about 1.4 you can increase the RI to 1.8 by adding titanium to the glass or using a polyphenyl ether based chemistry. You can make the RI lower by making a less dense form of glass (one of our products was a coating material used to make solar panels more efficient by having a lower RI, just over 1.2 and gaining about 3% in transmittance). To see the reflectance the light source has to be on your side. Think about standing outside in the dark looking into a lit room vs being inside looking out.
I've seen photos of that new building and, while it looks good, to me it seems like it would be similar to working in a habitrail with all the other hamsters. Adding to that the form over utility forcing the removal of the post-its warning of the glass, and it's all pretty silly.
I once worked for a company that had a new headquarters designed by a world renowned architect who was (like many artists) pretty full of himself. The building was visually stunning (and had the best office I ever had), but there were a few (defects in lighting (far too little) and snow problems (big slabs sliding off the roof to where people entered the building) to name a couple). His contract (which I did not work on) gave home subsequent approval authority over any changes to the building, and he refused to approve changes to remedy these--ultimately we had to threaten court action to get him to budge. And FWIW, there were a couple among senor management who took his side and said we should not change this "marvelous creation), we should force the workers to change to adapt to it, pretty much forgetting why we build offices in the first place.
