Polarized glasses?!
Question: How do they make polarized lenses?
Does anyone make clear polarized lenses to reduce night time driving headlight glare?
Answers: How do they make polarized lenses?
Does anyone make clear polarized lenses to reduce night time driving headlight glare?
not sure how they make polarized lenses but you can get lenses with anti-glare which will help with the strain and fatigue from headlights when night driving. Make sure you get a good quality though, some are dipped...these can peel. the good ones are layered throughout the lens (crizal alize is one of the better ones.)
As for how polarized lenses are made, technology has come a long way in recent years. The traditional method required laminating up to 17 layers of polyvinyl alcohol that is stretched, immersed in a warm iodine dye solution followed by a boric acid solution, then sandwiched between sheets of cellulose acetate butirate that must be scratch resistant coated prior to this process,then coated for UV protection.Then the sheets had to be die-cut, then molded, hopefully-to their respective sizes,shapes, and curves. These lenses had a tendency to peel apart, or delaminate. They also tended to be rather thick!
With the recent advances in technology, the process is done using a molecular bonding technique that encapsulates the polorization filters directly into the lens. Polarization can be thought of as a kind of vertical blind, only allowing the light through one axis, the horizontal, or 180 degree axis.When sunlight is reflected from any flat surface, that light becomes horizontally polarized, thus producing annoying, and sometimes almost blinding glare. Polarized eyewear has a 90 degree filtration to this horizontally polarized light. This perpendicular lens polarization eliminates this glare and greatly improves visual acuity, especially while driving.
Now as for your second question, I would love to know the answer to that myself! When I was an Optician at a large hospital close to a major Naval Air Training facility, which was also an island where many retired Naval Air pilots lived, I constantly had retired fighter pilots from as far back as WWII come in and ask for clear polarized eyeglasses for night-time. They all swore that the Govt. used to issue them to them for flying at night, and they loved them. I used to call every lab I could find and ask where I could get these lenses, and was always told "There is no such thing. That's impossible."
Well, I guess only the Government holds that secret, among others.
No. Polarized lenses eliminate about half the light so will always be dark.
The human eye is not a good night eye and cannot cope with the large difference in brightness between an oncoming headlight and the surrounding night darkness. There is no way to eliminate it.
Some people have eyes that are better optical instruments with fewer high level aberrations -- they will naturally have fewer problems with night glare. Other people have eyes that are poorer optical instruments with more aberrations-- they will naturally have more problems.