Apple's Patent to provide iPhone and iPad displays a private toggle

Of all the portable device displays on the market today, Apple has one of the most impressive with the Retina Display on the iPhone 4. It offers such a high resolution you can’t see the individual pixels while at the same time allowing multiple people to view content with wide viewing angles.

That’s all well and good when you want to share what’s on the screen with others, but what about those times when you are reading a private document, placing an order you don’t want your girlfriend to see, or just want to stop people looking over your shoulder at your beautiful screen?

Patently Apple has encountered a recent patent application by Apple that indicates that future displays of Apple mobile devices such as the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad will provide options for 'privacy mode viewing'.

Here’s how it will work, according to the patent:

How the user will actually enter privacy viewing mode is illustrated in Apple’s patentFIG. 2A’s patent point 210 below. Here we see that touching a corner of a future display will pull up a touch event option allowing the user to “change angle.” This will provide the user with options of entering various modes such as privacy and others. Refer to the above image for details on the privacy mode toggle is rumored to work. 

That Privacy Mode would require a new type of screen design, and that’s exactly what a new patent from the company covers in great detail. Currently there are reflective screen protectors that can achieve similar effects, but Apple’s privacy mode utilizes the electronic controlling of liquid crystal optical elements to hide your screen. Apple’s idea is to allow just about any LCD, LED, or OLED display to have this Privacy Mode applied. The method is complex, but relies on being able to control the direction of the light emanating from the display to the extent that it would only be viewable from a very small angle range. In other words, the person with the screen directly in front of them would be the only one seeing the content. This wouldn’t just be a setting, though, it seems Apple would allow the user to change that angle by some degrees.

It all sounds very clever, and Apple actually came up with the idea in the last quarter of 2009. It’s only now the patent has become viewable and carries the title “Systems and methods for electronically controlling the viewing angle of a display.”

Whether we ever see it used in a device depends on just how easy it is to implement in existing screen tech, and whether it can be implemented reliably and without making a device thicker. From a user’s point of view, I’m sure we’d all appreciate the ability to make our displays more private at the touch of a button or tap of a screen.

How well Apple implements it into its devices should make it or break it. Especially with Android-based mobile killing its sales this could be a pretty good feature to draw some if not many customers to its side.