If you’ve ever tried to use your iPad while wearing a pair of Ray Bans, you know the drill: you can barely see the display. Counter-intutively, it’s not an issue of brightness: rather, polarized sun-glasses work by only letting in light that vibrates vertically, and the light coming from LCDs vibrates the wrong way.
Your next iPhone or iPad, though? It might change all that.
Apple has just filed a patent for a new type of display capable of playing nicely with polarized sunglasses:
The layer receives the linearly-polarized light on one surface, converts the linearly-polarized light to circularly-polarized light, and then emits the circularly-polarized light from another surface,” the application reads. “By emitting circularly-polarized light, the display reduces the perceived distortion found at some angles when the display is viewed through a linearly-polarizing filter.
Given how much criticism Apple gets for how bad their displays look in bright sunlight, it’s thought that this patent might open the door for Appe to suggest users put on sunglasses when using their iDevice outdoors. iShades, anyone?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
