These smart glasses turn your blinks into electricity

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Your face is a power plant, and you’ve been running it for free your whole life. Every blink and jaw clench releases a tiny burst of mechanical energy that simply vanishes. A team at Northwestern University figured out how to catch it, using static electricity, the same stuff that makes a balloon stick to your hair. Their prototype glasses, GlassTENG, use that energy to run sensors tracking your pulse, blinks, and teeth clenching. As a feat of energy harvesting it’s fantastic, and I’d love to see it in everything from earbuds to shoe insoles.

Then the other shoe drops, because smart glasses are already the most side-eyed gadget around, with Meta’s Ray-Bans filming strangers in coffee shops and a battery that needs its case after a few hours serving as the only real limit. GlassTENG’s three sensors, built by Nivedita Arora’s VAK Embodied Systems Lab, draw just 4.1 microwatts combined, and the team wants to go fully battery-free next. That would remove the last speed bump on always-on face computers. Your pulse and jaw clenches are deeply personal data, and glasses like these could log them around the clock. Then again, if such glasses are coming anyway, I’d much rather they ran on blinks than on lithium-ion cells strapped to my head.

Designers: Nivedita Arora, Raj Dave, Jovanis Prodanich & Yung-ching Lai (Northwestern University)

A Silicone Sandwich That Turns Blinks Into Voltage

The sensor is a two-layer sandwich of PDMS, a soft silicone, and FEP, a slick fluoropolymer from the Teflon family. When the layers press together and spring apart, one hogs electrons from the other, which is the balloon-and-hair trick in a lab coat. Silver electrodes, each 150 nanometers thick, collect the resulting voltage. Pulse is the faintest signal, around 50 to 100 millivolts, while blinks and eyebrow raises land at 200 to 500 millivolts. A hard jaw clench climbs to about 1.5 volts, which is a wide enough range for one thin stack to tell a heartbeat from a chomp.

The silicone is Sylgard 184, mixed 10 to 1, degassed, spin-coated to roughly 490 microns (about 0.02 inches), and left to cure overnight. The FEP gets blasted with oxygen plasma on both sides, which roughens the surface so more of it touches the silicone. The team started by etching one side, then found that doing both measurably boosted the signal. Bare silicone faces your skin while the charge-trading interface stays sealed inside, so skin oils can’t muck up the readings. It’s baking show energy, just with a vacuum chamber instead of an oven.

Three Sensors, Three Spots, and Your Head Doing the Clamping

One sensor sits on the nose bridge over the angular artery, where it reads pulse, forceful blinks, and eyebrow raises. A second hangs off a small arm near the temple, aimed at the superficial temporal artery to catch clenching, tapping, and chewing. The third is embedded in the temple arm above the ear, and here the design gets clever, because the natural clamp of the frame on your head supplies the contact pressure for free. Early 3D-printed nose pads gave patchy contact, so the team swapped in adjustable off-the-shelf pads from regular eyewear. Decades of optician ergonomics beat the custom part, which is a humbling result for any designer.

In a study with 20 people, half of them daily glasses wearers, a Random Forest classifier (a machine-learning model that takes votes from many decision trees) sorted six activities with 93.8% accuracy. Forceful blinks and teeth tapping both hit 99%. Heart rate landed within 1.82 beats per minute of a Polar H10 chest strap, measured on 10 seated volunteers at rest. Talking was the weak spot at 55%, and the system mistook it for eating 37% of the time, since both work the same jaw muscle. For now, your glasses might assume you’re mid-sandwich when you’re just mid-rant, and honestly, I know people like that.

4.1 Microwatts: The Number Every Battery Spec Should Fear

Those 4.1 microwatts cover the sensing front-end, the circuitry that cleans up the sensor signal, and they look tiny next to the alternatives. The paper pegs optical pulse sensors (the glowing green lights on your smartwatch) at 1 to 10 milliwatts, and gel-based muscle sensors at 10 to 160 milliwatts. On a 100 mAh battery, the authors calculate that the GlassTENG front-end would cost less than half a minute of runtime, where an optical sensor would burn through hours. The prototype still uses a small battery for its microcontroller and Bluetooth, and fully battery-free operation is listed as future work. Even so, shrinking the sensing bill to almost nothing is what lets a frame stay a frame.

Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 starts at $449 and rates nine hours per charge, while the Meta Ray-Ban Display runs $799, and that charging case remains the main limit on how long those glasses can watch the world. GlassTENG has no price or release date, so nobody is buying it this holiday season. I’d happily see self-powered sensing in earbuds, insoles, and medical patches. Glasses are the tricky one, because the cleverer the sensor gets, the fewer excuses a company has to leave it off. Still, if face computers are coming regardless, I’ll take the pair powered by my own twitchy eyelids over the one with a lithium cell parked next to my temple.

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This Electric Superbike Wears Its Battery Like a Honeycomb

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Bees settled on the hexagon ages ago, and nobody has topped it since. The shape packs the most storage into the least material, which is why it turns up in honeycomb aircraft panels and in the way round battery cells get stacked together. Brisbane’s Clandestine Design Group took the hint and built an entire electric superbike around it. The Cellcius C-01 is a hypersport concept whose battery is split into eight hexagonal cells that you can pull out and swap. Those cells line the bike’s flanks like honeycomb, and the result is one of the more striking EV silhouettes I’ve seen in a while.

Neil Davidson, who founded Clandestine in 2014 after 14 years as Creative Director at CMD, has loved motorcycles since he was a three-year-old farm kid on a dirt bike. That obsession shows. The C-01 won a 2026 Australian Good Design Award in the Concept Design category. It is still a concept, so there is no price tag or showroom date yet. The studio’s pitch is that electric bikes force a choice between heavy track machines and short-range commuters, and the Hex-Core battery system lets one bike be both. Load two cells for the commute or all eight for the track, and the same machine changes its personality to match.

Designer: Clandestine Design Group

Two Cells for the Commute, Eight for the Track

Each Hex-Core cell holds 3 kWh, so the bike carries anywhere from 6 kWh to 24 kWh depending on how many you load. By the studio’s numbers, the weight swings from 353 lb (160 kg) as a commuter to 485 lb (220 kg) as a track bike. Do the math and each cell works out to roughly 22 lb (10 kg), a weight you could carry up a flight of stairs. Two cells also fit Australia’s Learner Approved Motorcycle Scheme (LAMS), a rulebook that keeps new riders on tamer bikes, according to the studio. I can’t think of another superbike that can shrink for a learner permit and then bulk up for a lap day.

Kawasaki’s Ninja e-1 launched in the US at $7,599, weighs 309 lb (140 kg), and carries two removable 1.5 kWh packs that Kawasaki rates at 41 miles in Road mode. Zero’s 2026 SR/F, the usual benchmark for a serious electric streetfighter, packs 17.3 kWh into a body listed at about 500 lb (227 kg). Fully loaded, the C-01 claims 24 kWh at 485 lb, beating the Zero on both counts. That makes the Ninja and the SR/F look like the two ends of a spectrum the C-01 wants to cover with one chassis. Kawasaki’s two-pack setup proves removable batteries work for city riders, and the C-01 keeps adding packs until it hits superbike territory.

A Honeycomb You Can Carry Home

A wall-mounted smart dock charges several cells at once, so a fresh set is always waiting for a swap, a trick the studio calls “zero-minute” hot-swapping. Apartment dwellers get an ergonomic backpack that carries cells indoors for charging at a regular wall outlet. Riders who would rather skip the hauling can plug into a flush CCS port on top of the tank, which hooks into standard street-side fast chargers. Empty bays double as mounts for hex-shaped duffel bags, which keeps luggage inside the silhouette instead of hanging panniers off it. That setup goes straight at the studio’s stated target, urban apartment dwellers who have nowhere to plug in.

Pulled out of the bike, a cell turns into a portable power station with AC and USB outlets, according to the studio. That is the power tool battery logic every contractor already lives with, where one pack format runs a drill, a saw, and a work light. DeWalt and Milwaukee built huge product families on that idea, and the C-01 wants a superbike in the club. The studio also sees room for an aftermarket of Hex-Core accessories, from luggage to those power stations. A 5G app handles keyless RFID or PIN entry, over-the-air updates, and firmware tuning based on payload.

Shaft Drive, a Venturi Tail, and the Case for Swappable Superbikes

High-pressure ram intakes feed air in at speed while a low-pressure exhaust in the tail pulls it back out, a Venturi effect the studio says passively extracts motor heat without heavy fans. Power reaches the rear wheel through a fully enclosed carbon shaft drive, which the studio calls silent and maintenance-free. BMW has been putting shafts on motorcycles since the R32 in 1923, so the idea has real pedigree. Brembo brakes and fully adjustable Öhlins suspension round out a spec sheet that reads like a track-day wish list. My one wish is for the angular flyscreen to echo the hexagons a little more, since right now it reads like it came from a different bike.

Australia’s Good Design Awards date to 1958, and the Concept Design category, new since 2025, judges early-stage ideas on form, function, feasibility, and safety. A win there rewards the thinking, and the thinking here is easy to admire. My favorite part is that the battery, usually the thing EV designers hide under a tank cover, becomes the main visual feature. Electric bikes have spent years arguing over range versus weight, and the C-01 answers by letting the rider settle it each morning. Bees figured out the hexagon without a design degree, and a Brisbane studio just reminded the motorcycle world how well it stacks.

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DRIFT’s Glass Sculpture Traces Wind Without Moving

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Wind usually needs an accomplice to become visible: a bending tree, a billowing curtain, a plastic bag having a much more cinematic afternoon than it deserves. Air itself gives us very little to look at. Aeolus, a new installation by Amsterdam-based studio DRIFT, takes on that perceptual problem with hundreds of suspended glass rods and light. It gives an invisible force a form you can actually follow.

The studio’s founders, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, have made Aeolus an interactive artwork rather than a conventional light fixture. Presented with Carpenters at London’s Ladbroke Hall from October 13 through 25, 2026, the installation takes its name from the Greek god of the winds. Its shape, though, comes from a specific earthly source: the architecture of the room containing it.

Designer: DRIFT

DRIFT begins with a digital reading of the surrounding architecture, then translates that space into a virtual environment where air can flow. The studio selects one moment from that simulated movement and gives it physical form in glass. That distinction matters. Aeolus isn’t showing a live reading of whatever breeze happens to be passing through the gallery. Its structure holds a chosen instant, while the lighting introduces a separate layer of change.

I like that the room has a say in the result. A sculpture built from its setting feels more considered than an impressive object dropped into an available corner. DRIFT says each installation is generated by its host architecture, so the curves carry information about a particular place. The building becomes part of the design process, even if visitors never see the digital model behind it.

In Benjamin Baccarani’s photographs, the rods gather into a long, sweeping formation, dipping at one end and stretching outward at the other. Fine suspension lines lead up to a broad overhead panel. The material list is more technical than the airy appearance suggests: borosilicate glass rods, stainless steel nodes, custom LEDs, and microcoax cables. I appreciate that contrast. Making an object look almost weightless still requires hardware, connections, and a deliberate relationship with gravity.

The glass itself stays still. According to Carpenters, small lights inside the rods change their rhythm and intensity in response to visitors moving through the space. Waves of illumination create the impression of motion without the sculpture physically shifting. That’s the cleverest choice here. The designers don’t need to swing a roomful of glass around to suggest wind; they let your eyes follow light across a fixed structure, doing much of the perceptual work.

The interaction also gives visitors a meaningful role without turning them into operators. Walking changes the work’s lighting, a relationship that seems appropriately direct for an installation about air and movement. I’m drawn to technology that makes its presence felt through an understandable response. Here, the interesting question is how your movement alters what you see, rather than how many technical features the system contains.

DRIFT frames Aeolus as an invitation to reconsider our relationship with nature. I’d treat that as a starting point for looking, not a transformation any artwork can promise. The more convincing achievement is smaller and more specific: making airflow legible through material and light. You don’t need to leave with a new environmental philosophy to appreciate the way a simulated path has become a collection of precise, luminous curves.

For me, the appeal sits in that modest shift in attention. The room stops being an empty container for an artwork and starts to look like a place shaped by movement. Aeolus makes that movement imaginable while keeping the glass suspended in a single instant. A visitor supplies motion, the lights answer, and the fixed structure takes on another rhythm. The glass gives you time to study a shape that moving air would never hold still for inspection.

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