A company called Johnson Controls have showcased very unique product in the CES 2018. It’s called the GLAS & it’s a Smart Thermostat but, it’s not one of our regular old school ones. Remember those crispy movie scenes where Computers were used with Transparent Screens ? Well, the GLAS comes with a pretty similar concept & the good thing is, it will actually go on sale this year.
The translucent OLED touchscreen display is actually made by Samsung & they nailed it. Here the Pixels are actually transparent but, as it’s an OLED so, it shall produce accurate colors on board. However, I don’t think that Blacks are achieved by turning off the pixels off as that would make the portion disappear in this case.
The GLAS has all the modern Thermostat features that you’d expect. So, mainly keeping track of things like the Temperature & Air Quality of it’s surroundings & maintaining them as needed. The GLAS can report humidity, total volatile organic compounds (tVOC) and equivalent carbon dioxide (eCO2) & if it is connected to the Internet, it can also monitor things like tree, grass and ragweed pollen count, ultraviolet (UV) index and air quality index (AQI)—including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone levels.
If air quality falls below moderate levels, GLAS can intelligently operate a fan or ventilation equipment to make the surroundings ideal or at least provide the information to the patients of diseases like Asthma & Allergy so, they can take proper protection.
It also integrates Microsoft Cortana as it’s voice assistant. So, this allows the users to Monitor & Control the Thermostat by just using their voice. A reason why Cortana was the option is because, the GLAS has utilized the Azure IoT Cloud and Windows 10 IoT Core. However, the users can also control the GLAS with a Dedicated Application on their Android or iOS devices.
The GLAS is powered by the Snapdragon 410E (embedded) SOC. Yes the Snapdragon 410 is a pretty old & low Power SOC for any Smartphone at this point but, the 410E was made for IoT applications like this & a Thermostat does not require the power like a Smartphone & the Purpose is also different so, we can’t really complain.
As far the Pricing & Availability goes, the GLAS will be up for Pre-orders on March of 2018 & the price will be around $319.