Toshiba achieves security breakthrough with LCD technology

Long established concerns about the security of entering PIN numbers in ATMs are now being reinforced by the need to assure personal privacy, whether entering personal data on a touch-screen, reading documents on a PC, or looking at digital images or video-mail on a mobile phone.

"Toshiba plans to commercialise the new technology on a global basis, and expects to start marketing in the second half of next year," says Ahmed Khalil, Middle East regional manager of the company's computer systems division. "This is an innovation that will be particularly attractive to customers here where there is such a high ratio of portable computers and mobile phones and privacy is a prime consideration."

In an age where touch-screen displays are increasingly used to provide information and services, and where mobile phones, PDAs and portable PCs are routinely used to transmit and share images and text, people spend more and more time looking at LCDs, often in public.

But attempts to assure user privacy, usually in the form of a screen filter to darken the screen when looked at from the side, have so far met little real success, as they also darken the screen for the user.

LCDs are either darker or brighter when viewed from an angle, depending on the arrangement of their pixels, and Toshiba's new technology takes advantage of this characteristic. Using a small circuit built into the display controller that aligns the pixels in the LCD, the pixels are ordered in different directions. When this is activated, anyone viewing a display from the side sees a different pattern, not the bright, clear image enjoyed by the user.

Toshiba's new technology also allows users of personal devices such as mobile phones to set the angle of view so that it can be widened to accommodate more people or narrowed to exclude people. The technology can also be used to to develop filters that display different patterns with different pixel alignments. The pattern itself can be programmed to display images such as logos or characters that can be used to display an ad, for example, when an ATM is not in use.