Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

LCD Monitor For Your Eyes Only 113

Bryan_Casto writes "USAToday has an article about Sceptre's new LCD monitor, which hides the screen image from anyone not wearing the glasses that come with the monitor. The screen appears white to ordinary eyes, but with the polarized glasses, the desktop comes into view. "
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

LCD Monitor For Your Eyes Only

Comments Filter:
  • by Anonymous Coward
    A really cool feature would be if you could switch back and forth between the "Visible" and "Invisible" modes. I'd imagine wearing those glasses all the time would quickly become tiresome. Of course I have 20-20 vision, so maybe those people who wear glasses would have a better tolerance.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    It says you can see your "Windows desktop". I wonder if they plan to have Linux support any time soon,, (i'm joking)..
  • by Anonymous Coward
    I have seen a successful tempest attack against a laptop with no monitor connected. I also have doubts about the effectiveness of "shielded" cable since most are designed with keeping *human noticable* noise *out* of the signal and are not designed to keep tempest detectable signal in. If you are really paranoid and the video cable shielding is strong enough to keep noise out, I would recommened leaving a noise source (popcorn popper, blender, etc.) on.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    ... Put on the included pair of special eyeglasses, however, and the ordinary white screen magically transforms into your Windows desktop...

    How in the world does it do that??? I haven't seen my windows desktop since it vanished into nothingness after I issued the 'mke2fs /dev/hda1' command several years ago. And I don't think I'm that anxious to pay $1199 to get it back...
  • by Anonymous Coward
    I recall that someone did market a pair of high-speed shutter glasses similar to what you describe. The 'shutters' themselves were actually LCDs that would darken and turn transparent (this solves the vibration/mechanical problems that another response to your post talked about).

    The application for these glasses was to darken the lens over each eye in an alternating sequence that was in sync with alternate displays on the screen to allow for truly awesome 3D displays (so I was told).

    I see no reason why the same technology couldn't be used to obscure the screen from unintended viewers in a more secure way than polarization.
  • I remembered that a few weeks ago and for a while was wondering if you could use something like that for 3D displays by having polarized lenses over each eye that are 90 degrees to each other.


    I wonder how you'd use a laptop that had been modified for use with the special glasses if you wanted to lie down or otherwise sit at a funny angle while using it. One of the advantages of laptops is that you can sit in odd manners while using them, but with this modified screen the image could disappear if your head is at the wrong angle (because the magic glasses have polarized lenses).
  • Apparently all you need to do to avoid mooching is carry an HP in high school and a TI in college.

    (Or you could carry a slide rule... nobody ever asks to borrow my slide rule... but slide rules aren't programmable :( )
  • I think that may have been the worst movie I've ever seen. We were watching it one night at Vermont Tech, 'cause there wasn't anything else to do, and we only got one channel... they kept going to commercial break, showing *one* commercial, then going back to the movie...

    We were sitting around yelling, "More commercials! No! Not the movie! Ahhh! We want to see more commercials!" at the TV screen.
  • Aren't most of the Anti-Glare Filters polarizers. I know that the Polaroid screens are, but not sure about the others. Wouldn't that be a solution for not wanting to wear the glasses all of the time. Just slap the polarizer on, and when you need to go into secure mode, pull it off and put on the glasses.
  • What company is going to buy this for their employees? I think 1) most bosses want to know if their employees are working and not going to girlie sites and 2) if people are surfing the web when they're not supposed to they'll be logged on the server anyway.

    No one will buy this at home. If you're single, you don't need to hide anything. If you're married your spouse will want to know if your doing something you shouldn't. (Will cause many headaches and arguments.)

    The only possible customer would be those working on confidential/secret/top secret documents and I doubt the Govt. is going to spend extra money for this.

    I think this monitor will have a very small clientelle. Maybe conspiracy theorists...

    Misfit
  • IBM had a ThinkPad that lacked a polariser in its display. You used the included polaroid glasses (or used your own) to view the image on the screen. They probably still have it, but I haven't seen it anymore for a long time now.
  • Yes, partially polarizing sunglasses will let you partially view it, i.e., the contrast is not great but you still get the picture.
  • by Roast Beef ( 2298 ) on Friday July 23, 1999 @08:45AM (#1787489) Homepage
    "Excellence for all the world to see"

    Ironic, eh?
  • This will be great for our sysadmin/netadmin. Instead of having to painfully minimize his porn sessions when someone walks by, he can just wear his glasses all day. Neat!
  • Until, of course, there's a sunny day and everyone comes in wearing their polarised sunglasses... oops! Security by non-obscurity, anyone? :-)
  • Most polarization displays use rotational polarization, not linear. That is, the curl of the photons matters, rather than the... the whatever it is that is affected by linear polarization. :) Rotation doesn't matter in such situations, nor does which way the polarizer is plunked down (corkscrews remain with the same winding no matter how they're put down); the only real drawback (again, for this situation) is that you have to have two distinct polarizers rather than being able to have two of the same and just turn one 1.57079632679489661923132169 radians.
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
  • by drig ( 5119 )
    Is this real security or something to stop nosy people in the office (like the article says)? I'm not sure if a tempest attack will work against a flat screen, but there has got to be something similar if not. Does this screen protect against something like Tempest?
  • According to previous posters, this works by taking the top polarizing filter off the LCD panel and putting in some "sunglasses" instead.

    So, don't look directly at the panel. Look instead at its reflection in the surface of the desk. Most surfaces reflect polarized light. This is why Polaroid sunglasses work at all; they reduce glare by mounting polarizers at 90 degrees to the polarized axis of the reflected light.

    Since the light coming off the panel is already polarized, when it bounces off the surface of the desk (which is a natural polarizer), the display's reflection should be somewhat intelligible. They have an exhibit demonstrating this sort of thing in San Francisco's Exploratorium [exploratorium.edu].

    Schwab

  • Unless they key each set of goggles to a specific screen, which they can't :-)

    A very silly screen.

    --
  • Most sunglasses are "polarized" these days. You could probably use them to spy on the person's screen without drawing any attention to yourself.

    Another form of security through obscurity?

    --
  • Seems to me if you're going to go to all this trouble you should just have a head-mounted display.
  • sounds rather worthless to me... anyone w/ polarized glasses can see everyone else's screens. this is barely a step above talking in pig latin for "secrecy".
  • This is just a normal LCD display with the front polarizer removed. Anyone else with a polarizer could see it too.

    -Ed
  • Probably with typical Tempest systems, but they could easily be modified to work. The information is still present in the display, it just looks different, so a Tempest system could still extract the information from an unshielded monitor cable.
    ------------------------------------------ -------------
    If you need to point-and-click to administer a machine,
  • I saw this at Comdex 99 (Toronto, ON) and it was truly great. You could not tell at all what was on the screen, except when looking through the special glasses. Although this isn't entirely new (I've heard about it for over a year) it was nice to see it in person.

    Of course, people would start getting frustrated. Why, you could be viewing porn right on the subway and no one would notice ;)
  • tried it with a desktop-calculator (liquid-crystal-
    display) and removed the film in front of the
    glass with the liquid in it.
    then you only can see the digits if you place
    the previously removed film in front of your eyes.
    ff this principle is usesd in this displays then
    you can build one on your own. just remove the
    film... done.
  • well, yeah, but someone wearing sunglasses in the office would be afully easy top spot.

    My wife is an accountant, but she has to cover for the receptionist when the receptionis is at lunch. She always bitches that she has to drop everything to cover, because she can't do her accounting stuff at the receptionists desk (even though everything is networked and she COULD do it but - ) becuase the computer is in a public area and she can't have everyones salary information displayed on that screen.

    This would be perfect for that situation.

    -geekd
  • Yeah you can! Just put a plorized condom on!

    then no one could see it!

    HEY! Why don't our military guys all wear polorizer suits and glasses! The they could see each other, but to the enemy, they'd be invisible!

    :-)

    -geekd
  • The problem with wearing these in public, like on the subway, is that you also get to (unfortunately) see all the other signs that already use this technology subliminally [imdb.com]. All those "Obey" and "Sleep" and "Marry and Reproduce" signs would get depressing after a while.

  • This system does only prevent anyone not having those glasses (glasses aren't unique from what I know) to view the content of your screen. And I'l bet everyone you want to hide it from will wear a pair of those glasses...

    A better solution (That does exist, but not for the public market, from what I know) is glasses with a built in projector that projects the picture onto the back of the eye-globe... No one except you can see what it projects, and you can get as large picture as you want (A 2m^2 screen at a distance of 1.5m, or any other size and distance).
  • 1. Remove the polarised panel that is on top of the actual lcd screen. (may not easy or even possible)
    2. Buy polarised sunglasses.
    3. Surf to playboy.com

    This can also be done with calculators and digital watches etc. (I've done it)

  • first of all, although it may seem so, it's not secure. anyone with polarized glasses can look in on this. and if you're in an office that uses these things, and everyone has polarized glasses, well then forget it!

    also, do you have to keep your head perfectly vertical at all times? that sucks. (i don't know how lcd's operate.)

    - pal
  • I remember reading about a company that did this to laptops in PC Magazine years and years ago. You'd ship your laptop to them, who would modify the screen, and ship it back to you with a pair of those special glasses.

    Everything old is new again...

    --John Riney
    jwriney@awod.com
  • Nope. As far as I can remember from the article, LCD panels have a layer in them(I think it's called a polarizer, not sure) that does some freaky voodoo, making the image on the LCD visible. Without it, you can't see squat. Basically, they take that layer out of the panel. The glasses are coated with the same stuff. Voila - no glasses, no picture.

    --John Riney
    jwriney@awod.com
  • Pointy haired bosses wouldn't want their workers to have these, but the same PHBs would love to have them for themselves. As a school teacher, I would find it useful; I could write tests without worrying that students would come up behind me and start writing crib notes. HR types (a subspecies of PHBs) - or anyone who dealt with private personnel information - would have a use for these.

    This is one of those things that comes under the category of keeping honest people honest. Most people won't sit down and search through their boss's computer for someone else's performance review, but they might read what just happens to be on the boss's screen.

    This is all assuming that the product lives up to it's hype, which I doubt.
  • More high tech -
    NASA realized in the 60s that traditional pens were useless in the microgravity, unpressured environment of space - there was no "down" for the ink to flow to. A million-dollar contract was awarded to a high-tech firm who solved the problem in a high-tech way by creating a pressurized ink cartridge which forced the ink out, even in outer space. The Russians, facing the same problems but strapped for cash, sent their cosmonauts into space...with pencils.
  • In high school, my friend removed the appropriate film from his calculator, as others here have described.

    This was in the early '80s, when `Friday the Thirteenth part III in 3-D' was out, as well as other 3D movies that used polarizing glasses. So one eye saw black-on-white and the other eye saw white-on-black.

    Even better, the glasses that he needed to view his calculator were decorated with fireplace-pokers with blood dripping from them, hockey masks, etc. He also had glasses from `Jaws 3 in 3D' and a Molly Ringwald movie called `Space Hunter' (iirc) -- but the two were *combined* into one pair of glasses. So this had shark fins and space ships on it. Man, I envied him.

  • at least ones that don't do graphs. You can also reverse the screen to get cool greyish-white numbers on brownish-black. Definitely impressed my friends back in junior high!
  • yes it's true
  • IIRC it's called a polarisation filter. Basicly, what it does is filter out all the light that's not polarized in one direction. The all the actual lcd does is polarize the part where the letters / image etc is one way, and the white parts the other way. (With added voodoo for color displays.

    You can easily try this with the average $1 calculator. Just open it up and take the top layer of the display. The only way to view it is with the little piece of plastic in front (Or with those expensive (well, they used to be anyway) sunglasses, wich are really just the same stuff. I think you'd be able to view the laptop with them aswell). Extra fun: Turn the polarisation filter 90 degrees, and you get the negative! Idem for laptops iirc.
  • Some IMAX movie theatres already use this technology. I have been to one in Irvine, California USA that uses glasses that are polorized, and they are constantly synched via infrared. The glasses actually use LCD's of their own to turn them on and off, one on each eye, flashing at different times. I actually got a pair with weak batteries (I think that's what the problem was, I forget it was a few years ago) at the beginning of the first time I went and it messed things up pretty good.

    Anyway, you thought up a neat idea and the technology already exists - it could definately be applied to this privacy idea somehow I'm sure.

    --Sonet
    paul.levitz(AT)hbcsd.k12.ca.us
  • This is nice, but it would realy be nice if you could mask the contents of the screen so only part of the screen would be hidden. Now picture this, imagine if you could have n glasses and each would show diferent parts of the screen. This would must certainly would be nice for "hot seat" games, I don't know if it would have any other utilities. :-)


    --
    "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
  • You didn't got my idea. The computer would choose witch parts would be shown and with part would be hidden (to be revealed with a specific glass) by software.

    --
    "take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
  • It would really rock if someone could do this with plain ol' CRT's. I'd get all my monitors done.

    That way, you could just peel off the film or whatever, just in case you lost your glasses.

    Speaking of which. With this system, are each pair of glasses tuned to the LCD, or is it a generic thingy?


    -------------------------------------
  • This wouldn't keep other people from looking at your screen. All they'd have to do is put on their own pair of polarized sun glasses. It aint a countermeasure if all I have to do is spend $5 at a fishing store.

    Though the polarity of the sunglasses wouldn't necessarily be the same... you'd have to turn your head sideways :)
  • by adamx12 ( 30070 ) on Friday July 23, 1999 @09:32AM (#1787524)
    I did this with my old ThinkPad 350C it looks pretty sweet. I fully recommend that anyone with an old portable that they want to play around with gives it a shot. The trick is getting the screen cover to pop off, some models are harder than others. But if you can get the top polarized filter out you're golden. Then just replace the top filter with a piece of clear sturdy plastic about the smae thickness (plexiglass works great of you can find it that thin.) Get a pair of old school snowboarding goggles and cut out circles from the filter you removed and fasten them to the inside of the goggles and WALA! Stealth computing. It looks pretty fly when you're hacking away at your portable and there's nothing but a blank screen in front of you.
    And if you really wanna be smooth, try painting over the characters on the keyboard so you have a completely blank terminal in front of you. My thinkpad looks cool this way.
  • AC Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" has an example of something like this - he wears a pair of, for lack of a better term, "decoder glasses", and only he can see what's on his screen. Difference was that these seemed to be encoded, so that you wouldn't simply need a polarizer to create this effect. Is there any work being done in this area, sort of a "visual encryption"?
  • I have a laptop and I get a little nervous about people staring at my screen all the time, watching everything I'm doing.

    I know they're just curious but it's unsettling. It's like people who constantly stare at you in public. I don't like it.

    This stealth laptop thing looks like a really good idea. Try putting it in a HOWTO and announcing it on Freshmeat.

    A lot of people will probably thank you.
  • Wow, that must be a pretty high-tech calculator/watch if you were surfing playboy.com on it. Or did it just display "36-24-36" or "58008 918" (read it upside down on a calculator if you're not juvenile enough to get it) instead of a picture of a naked woman?
  • Hmmmm....

    Polarization by LCD's and glasses is not as accurate as you seem to imply. A small change in angle will only change the image slightly, not make it disappear. For that, you need a rather large change in angle (probably > 10 degrees).

    So, anyone with polarizing glasses and a flexible neck, or anyone with an adjustable polarization filter (as used on camera's) will be able to read the display.

    Also, this is not really `new'. It has been around for at least a year by now...

    Cheers//Frank
  • Wouldn't the colours go all funky if you tilt your head by 90 degrees? I know mono LCDs invert if you rotate or flip the polarizer, so I'd imagine a colour one would be interesting.
  • Now picture this, imagine if you could have n glasses and each would show diferent parts of the screen.

    Personally, I'd find it rather tedious and annoying to have to wear all the glasses at once so I could see the entire screen, because I wouldn't want to have to constantly switch glasses to look at different parts of my screen.

    However, I think it's an ok idea, but if it can be done by oneself, I certainly would instead of buying that gizmo for all that money. It's a major rip-off. I have an LCD screen on my laptop, but I don't worry about it, or about what people might see. If it's that big of an issue, do it on paper so you can destroy the evidence. =)

  • Some one sitting at the secretary's desk with dark glasses? Doesn't seem right.
  • All that a shutter does is not show the picture for a certain amount of time. Which is good for 3D applications but won't work for that security kind of thing. All you have to do is not wear any such glasses, and you see the picture quite clearly. Probably with less flicker than someone wearing those shutterglasses.
  • Yes, I know this (I assumed, rather incorrectly, that by me saying "shutter glasses", that everyone knew I was meaning LCD shutterglasses, versus mechanical contraptions - which the first replyee seemed to think, and which was done - sorta - on a Vectrex)...

    As far as polarization needing more than a small turn - yes that is true, didn't even think about that. I also though later that LCD shutter glasses might not even work properly, unless perhaps they were times to the horizontal refresh, and not the vertical.

    I guess I need to get back to thinkin'!...
  • The way these things work, obviously, is by polarization - IIRC, the LCD elements are sandwiched between two polarizing sheets - the first sheet gives the light (from the backlight) a twist 90 degrees, and the second gives another 90 degree twist. What an LCD element does is give a third (actually, a second) 90 degree twist to allow the light to be seen...

    Now, if the polarizer on the front and back of the LCD could be positioned at a different angle (and at very minute steps), the 90 degree twisty thingy would still work (since the LCD is probably standard), but you would need the glasses to be at the same angle in order to view the image. These glasses, of course, would be matching glasses to the LCD (order many pairs!), and if the manufacturer varied the angle at small angles (and even possibly a different random angle on each LCD made in sequence), then each monitor would be unique (sorta like Master Lock Combo Locks are unique). However, I doubt any manufacturer would do this...

    There are, of course, problems with such a system - mainly, you need to hold you head level - any deviation and the screen goes blank (of course, this affects the current set up). You would also have co-workers running around the office with polarizing sunglasses on waggling thier heads crazily (Ow! My neck! Workman's comp!) - I don't know which would be funnier; guessing who is looking at pr0n or watching the head wagglers!

    Anyhow - no matter what - this is security by obscurity at best. But how about this...

    What if the glasses were active - say high speed shutter glasses timed to the refresh rate of the monitor. Now, if the monitor refresh rate could be changed on the fly, using some kind of method whereby it could read some code from the glasses being used to view the monitor, and it would lock onto a sync generated by the glasses or something to change the refresh and the flicker speed of the glasses to match. Then, only the first person viewing the monitor would see what he should see! Does this sound feasible?
  • The way Big Brother sees your monitor without that pinhole camera, works off of the signal monitor cables give off
  • What is Tempest? Somebody educate me, it sounds interesting.
  • Feasible? well.... yes in the sence that it could be done. No in the sense that it would be incredibly expensive to make and then would probably have problems:
    1. the "high speed shutter glasses" would probably vibrate horribly from having to click open and shut god knows how many times per second, also they would probably be really heavy so they could include all the parts that make it do this. I would expect that the first generation of this (at least) would be full head sets to distribute the wieght and vibrations.

    2. iirc, the monitor does not cycle between showing the whole screen at once and being black x times per second, but rather it has a point of light that races across the screen continuously (probably top left to bottom right). therefore, the refresh capability of the monitor would have to be high enough that it could quickly cover the whole screen while your shutter was open, then display something while your shutter was closed that was sufficiently different to prevent other people from being able to tell what the real image was AND cycle the whole thing fast enough so that your personal refresh rate was decently high. The hardest part would be designing the confuser image, which would probably have to be quite dynamic to fool everyone.

    And then there is the problem of setting up a secure, dependable and wireless conection between glasses and monitor. In any case, it could work someday when have sufficiantly advanced components to work with (and someone feels a need for this level of security), but (not that i really know about these things), i don't think it would work too well right now.
  • There are several problems with using LCD glasses such as size, weight, resolution and cost. It is not always convenient to carry around your laptop and all of the assorted paraphenalia to support the LCD glasses.
  • This makes me wish I had some important information from my work so I could wish I had one of these. Now, with all the recent news about cypers making deals with governmental police forces, would they get these glasses too? Maybe some camera lenses so that if they nees to "shadow" a suspect, they can see what they are doing on their computer... most likely pr0n

    =P
  • This is too much like the Rowdy Roddy Piper movie in which the glasses make all of the aliens who want to take over the Earth (hiding in the guise of humans, of course) look like their true selves...

    Maybe we'll all discover that our managers are from another planet after all. No wonder they just don't get us...

    They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me.

  • > The ending wasn't too good, but it had one of the best 'fight-your-buddy-in-the-alley' scenes I've ever witnessed.

    I don't think it was that bad, but I don't have any delusions about it being a great movie, either. The scene that you're referring to, though, was indeed a great scene. They showed it on campus a couple years ago, and my friends and I laughed our asses off (loudly) at a late showing of it, no scene making us laugh more than that one.

    They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me.

  • Bosses will love this. Now your workers can all be browsing Slashdot all day long, and you'll never know about it!

    "No, really, I'm using it for... confidential information..."

  • This is old news, why is it being reported again?
  • It would be interesting to put up a color display of flowers that are currently in bloom and see if any bees are attracted to the (blank to humans) screen.
  • They do see polarized light. It's how they do solar navigation on cloudy days.

    (Yes, they see colors in ultraviolet, too.)
  • The only way that could be done would be putting something over the monitor. Either that, or using material that can be polarized/depolarized by running an electric current through it (which exists). I'm not sure how expensive it is, though.
    ---
  • ... in high school. Removed the polarizer from my calculator to keep mooches from borrowing it all the time. "Can I borrow you Calc?" "Sure, here" "Oh, it doesn't work" "Oh really? I'll have to fix it." When I needed to use it, I slapped it back on and voila!
  • Sorry, but I also have to question why everyone thinks this idea is so new. When I first say laptops come out with polarized screens back in '93 I did the same thing as adamx12 except instead of wreacking a good pair of old school boarding goggles, spend $6 on *FISHING GLASSES*! You want an old school look, nothing beats aviators.
  • BFD...
    I used to take the polarizer off calculators when I was 8 so only i could see it.
  • Cool idea.
    But aside from viewing porn, playing quake without your mom knowing, or combining it with PGP to hide _everything_, it doesent have to much application. eventually, these may be used like passwords, your pair of glassed can see things others cant, like on a public screen facing a city. just look at it and see your own private message.
  • I know that the science of polarization doesn't support it, but what if the "stealth screen" were blue instead of white? Then I suppose the USA Today article referring to hiding "your Windows desktop" would have to explain:

    Glasses off ... blue screen ... stealth mode
    Glasses on ... blue screen ... normal Windows malfunction.
  • "Put on the glasses!"
    "No!"

    *pow*
    *pow*
    *pow*

    Ahhhhhh, that was a *weird* movie...
  • Hmmmm. I do see one possible use: if you're using a laptop with proprietary data in a public place, and you want to avoid

    a) casual observers (e.g. people next to you on an airplane). This might be important if you're on a deadline and you need every bit of work time you can get...

    b) things like security cameras and such from capturing whatever's on your screen (although, if they see you typin' away on a supposedly perfectly white screen, the more paranoid sec staff might get curious...). This would be an unusual case, perhaps, but possible.
  • I have a pair of partially polarizing sunglasses. Would something like that be sufficient to view the display?
  • Seems like a cheap but weak solution. Some others here mentioned some neat ideas like encryption glasses that talk to the monitor. That sounds unecessarily complicated. Just get glasses with LCDs on them, nobody else can see, and its simple.

    OR, you could close your door.
    hi tech that one :)
  • I don't think this is meant as C2 security; I wouldn't expect to see these systems popping up in the pentagon any time soon! Ultimately, if people REALLY want to know what's going on, they'll find a way... and if you don't want them to, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot more than a cheap monitor trick. The point of this, however, is not security but privacy. It's like having a door on a stall in a public bathroom ;-) In a corporate work environment, this might be a nice plus for someone who doesn't like people constantly looking over their shoulders. Sure, someone could, but it would likely be more noticable (especially if they were wearing sunglasses inside of cubicle-land).

    And ultimately, the market will decide. If the yuppies buy them, great, good idea. No, that's does't make it a neat science, but it makes it a viable business.

    "Don't feed the animals".

What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey

Working...