During his first years of glass consulting, a team member has been confronted with several building owners that were not happy about distorted views when looking through the glass.
Architectural glass specifications are quiet on this phenomenon, although it is really disturbing in critical applications like observation decks and air traffic control towers. And annoying in high-end retail, residences or open office spaces.
In this paper, we will review global standards and practise for see-through distortion in both architectural and automotive markets. We will describe how we used those standards to assess the optical quality of large glass in a manufacturing setup. This will show that the measurement is cumbersome and hardly applicable to field measurements.
That was our motivation to develop a portable device that can deliver an accurate reading of see-through distortion. As we write this abstract, the device is only conceptual, and we cannot guarantee a fully functional unit, but we will present our journey to develop it, and the results obtained with the various prototypes.