According to a list recently announced by the United States Trademark and Patent Office (USPTO), Apple has obtained a patent for a screen that can block 90% of strong light in an outdoor direct sunlight environment. Thereby increasing the visibility of the screen.
Apple said in the patent that bright ambient light may reduce contrast and dilute display content. In order to improve the contrast of the screen when there is sufficient light, Apple has built-in light-shielding elements similar to “louvers” in the screen, which can be static or dynamic (adjustable).
The blackout element is primarily an asymmetrical “louver” film, and one or more additional adjustable components are included within the screen to optimize the display based on real-time ambient lighting conditions.
The system can call the ambient light sensor to determine the surrounding ambient light level. Based on the detected ambient light level, control circuitry in the system adjusts one or more adjustable elements in the display.
The screen part is embedded with an adjustable diffuser, which has at least two different haze states. When the detected ambient light level is low, the adjustable diffuser can be in a high diffusion state to mitigate the screen door effect of the display. When detected ambient light levels are high, the adjustable diffuser can be in a low-diffuse state to increase the contrast of the display.
The display screen may include a tunable tone layer that has at least two states with different levels of transmission. When detected ambient light levels are low, the tunable tint layer can be in a high-transmission state to increase display efficiency. When detected ambient light levels are high, the tunable tint layer can be in a low transmittance state to increase the contrast of the display.
Attachment of the patent sketch as follows. The light-shielding element in Figure 3 can be a dark coating. The light-shielding element can only transmit 10% of the incident light and absorb the remaining 90% of the incident light.
Since ambient sunlight must pass through the solar suppression element twice before reaching the observer/user, this solar suppression element reduces the brightness of the reflected sunlight to 1% of the initial sunlight brightness.
