Light-Modulating Glasses for Private Multi-User Display
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing display systems for multiple users, such as in vehicles or buildings, face challenges in ensuring that each user can view individualized content while maintaining privacy and preventing external observers from viewing the content, especially when multiple users share a display.
Innovation Solution
The system employs light-modulating glasses with synchronized liquid crystal light modulators that alternate between transparent and opaque states to align with desired and dummy image frames on a shared display, ensuring each user sees unique content while obscuring it from external observers.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Device complexity
If multiple users share a display without light-modulating glasses, then device complexity is reduced, but privacy is compromised and users cannot view individualized content
Solution Approach 1:
Light-modulating glasses serve as an intermediary device between the shared display and each user's eyes. The glasses contain light modulators that selectively block or transmit light based on synchronization signals, enabling private viewing of individualized content while maintaining a single public display. This intermediary solution resolves the contradiction by adding privacy protection without requiring multiple displays.
Solution Approach 2:
The display content is segmented into multiple synchronized image frame sequences, each corresponding to a different user. The light-modulating glasses segment the light output by selectively blocking frames not intended for the wearer, allowing each user to perceive only their designated content stream from the same physical display.
2Reliability
If light-modulating glasses are used to provide individualized content to multiple users, then privacy is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The light-modulating glasses serve multiple functions: they act as privacy filters, content selectors, and synchronization devices simultaneously. The same optical modulator component enables both privacy protection and individualized content delivery, reducing the need for additional separate systems and mitigating the complexity increase.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses periodic alternating frames at different rates for different users, with light modulators switching between transparent and opaque states in synchronization with these periodic frame sequences. This periodic action enables multiple content streams to be multiplexed through a single display without requiring complex spatial separation.
3Reliability
If dummy frames are interspersed among image frames to obscure content from external observers, then privacy is improved, but loss of information increases
Solution Approach 1:
Dummy frames are applied locally and selectively - they obscure content from external observers viewing the display without affecting the quality of content received by users wearing synchronized light-modulating glasses. The light modulators ensure that only authentic frames are transmitted to authorized users, while dummy frames provide privacy protection for unauthorized viewers.
Applied Scientific Principles
This section explains which scientific principles are used to turn an abstract innovation direction into a practical engineering solution.
Function Achieved in This Case
This solution allows multiple users to view individualized content on a shared display while maintaining privacy by using light-modulating glasses that synchronize with the display's image frames, preventing external observers from viewing the content, even when dummy frames are interspersed to enhance privacy.
Implementation Method 1
The light-modulating glasses may have light modulators such as liquid crystal light modulators
Implementation Method 2
Wireless circuitry in the light-modulating glasses may be used to synchronize the light modulators to the image frames
Data Source
AI summary
Electronic equipment in a system such as a vehicle or building may include one or more displays. The displays may display image frames for users with light-modulating glasses. The image frames may include interspersed image frames corresponding to unique content for each of the users. Dummy frames may be incorporated into the displayed frames on the display to help obscure displayed content from external observers. The light-modulating glasses may have light modulators such as liquid crystal light modulators. Control circuitry in the glasses may adjust the light modulators to exhibit transparent intervals that overlaps desired image frames and opaque intervals that are aligned with other image frames and the dummy frames. This allows each user to view unique content on a shared display while preventing external observers without glasses from observing the content that is being presented.