How does 1-way glass work?
In: Technology
Light goes through both ways, but most of it gets reflected towards whichever side it starts on. The thing that makes one side more visible is that it’s brightly lit, while the other side is kept dark.
It’s two way glass, really. But it reflects a greater portion of the light that strikes it than your typical window.
So you make Room A bright, and Room B dim. In room A, the bright light reflects off the window, like a mirror, and while some light reaches you from room B, it is washed out by the brightness.
Meanwhile in Room B, there might be dim reflections in the room, but it is largely washed out by the bright light coming through from room A.
You experience a similar effect inside a lit house if it is dark outside. You’ll see a reflection of the interior in your windows. Turn off the lights (or walk up to the window and shield your eyes) and you’ll see outside (assuming there’s *some* light, anyway, out there).
I want to add the reason it works is because there’s usually a reflective material, like a really thin almost transparent layer of metal on the ‘mirror’ side. This creates a reflection in the glass, but still let’s let through both ways. When the mirror side is bright and the other side is not, the reflection on the metal is much brighter than the light that comes through from the darker side.
It’s sort of like how you can’t see stars in the sky when it’s really bright at night. The light from the stars is still there, but because there’s so much more much brighter light coming from everywhere else you can’t even see the light from the stars anymore.
The light from the dark side still passes through the mirror, it’s just totally outshone by the reflection since the reflection is deliberately kept much brighter. On the other hand, on the dark side the image from the brighter room is much brighter than the reflection from the dark side, so they see the image from the other room instead of a reflection.
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