Innovation in smart buildings has been increasing in recent years, catalyzed by the democratization of cloud, AI, and IoT. Our recent Azure Digital Twins announcement highlights Microsoft’s commitment to IoT innovation. Organizations benefit from virtually representing their physical environments to deliver on various IoT scenarios, including smart buildings. By gathering data from a broad variety of sensors and devices, organizations are able to more precisely understand and optimize the spaces they occupy, and alter them to best serve people’s needs. As compute power disseminates to every physical environment that people use, buildings have become top-of-mind in their potential to generate efficiency gains and occupant satisfaction. Making IoT accessible to any customer, regardless of size or background, heavily relies on our partners’ creativity and unique domain expertise. New revolutionary devices allow us to capture richer and more meaningful data, and create breakthrough smart building applications. We’re thrilled to share some of the work we are doing with View, a company that has reinvented something that hasn’t changed for centuries – the window.

View is on a mission to create delightful human environments

View believes human health and wellness should be central to smart buildings. That’s why they are on a mission to use dynamic glass to improve the human experience in buildings by making them more intelligent, more connected, and more personalized than ever before. View’s dynamic glass windows let in the optimal amount of natural light while preserving views, to significantly improve the wellbeing of building occupants, while simultaneously reducing building energy usage. Harvard Business Review just published a study identifying natural light as the #1 desired office perk. Another recent study found significant health benefits associated with View Dynamic Glass over regular windows, including greater than 50 percent reductions in eye strain, headaches, and drowsiness – all contributing to improved employee health and productivity.

View shares Microsoft’s vision – that by generating data and applying context to it, we can empower organizations to better analyze how building space is used and optimize it to serve peoples’ needs at every level — from employee health and productivity, to energy efficiency, to contextual personalization.

New partnership

Today we are thrilled to announce a new partnership with View and are excited at the prospect of working together to develop innovative applications for smart buildings. As part of this partnership, View will leverage their expertise in smart buildings and utilize multiple aspects of the Azure IoT platform to accelerate their solutions development. For example, View will leverage Azure Digital Twins for access control and other smart buildings applications, as well as Azure IoT Edge and Azure Sphere for its window and floor controller devices.

The first solution, View SmartProtect, is being announced today. View SmartProtect is a smart window-based, building security solution that automatically and instantaneously detects glass breakage. As soon as glass is broken on any window in a building, a signal is sent through Azure IoT to View’s SmartProtect application notifying the customer of the specific time, window, and location within a building where the glass break event occurred.

View SmartProtect is the first of several IoT solutions from View that aim to make buildings healthier, smarter, and more productive, with applications leveraging the Azure IoT platform. This is just a first step in bringing the next level of intelligence and personalization to building spaces. Through this partnership View customers will benefit from best-of-breed productivity solutions that are robust, secure, and scalable to meet future needs.

Boundless possibilities

The next leg of the journey will take a data-centric approach to optimizing a building space for each individual to maximize health and productivity, in a highly automated and effortless way. View will create an intelligent edge that includes interactive glass displays and sensor arrays with cameras, microphones, air quality sensors, and more into its window frames.

These “smart windows,” integrated with Azure IoT, Office 365, Cortana, and Dynamics 365 will enable spaces to better serve their occupants and empower people to interact with their environment in new ways. It is a showcase example of the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge in action. Through ubiquitous distributed computing enabled by the public cloud and a continually expanding set of connected systems and devices – now including the windows and walls of your building – we will interact continually with our ambient environment in much richer ways. View provides a high density, powered, always-connected platform to enable several transformative applications.

For example, once occupants enter a smart building, the building could recognize that people are entering a space for the first time and tell them, “This space can be controlled by voice commands. Just tell me if you are too cold or too hot and I’ll adjust the environment to your preference.” This voice interaction could automatically adjust the tint of the windows, the HVAC levels, and the lighting conditions to create an optimal environment.

I’m excited by the possibilities of this partnership and look forward to seeing how Azure Digital Twins will empower View to offer solutions that improve occupants’ health and wellbeing. View’s innovation provides a new foundation for limitless smart building innovations. I can’t wait to see what’s next!

Learn more

Learn more about Azure Digital Twins and View. If you’re coming to Smart City Expo Word Congress, be sure to stop by the Microsoft booth to see View preview SmartProtect, the industry’s first smart window-based glass-break detection solution.