Liquid Crystal Displays with Variable Viewing Angles Using Electric-Field-Driven Liquid Crystal Lenses as Diffusers

We propose a novel method for appropriately controlling the luminance distribution of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) for different usage environments by using electric-field-driven liquid crystal (ELC) lenses. The LCD systems are composed of quasi-collimated backlights (QCBLs), LC panels, and ELC lenses that are used as diffusers. To achieve a wide viewing angle, light is diffused with the ELC lenses by controlling its retardation with the voltage applied to the electrodes. For private use, a narrow viewing angle is achieved by turning the ELC lenses off so that the collimated light from the QCBLs passes directly through the liquid-crystal layer of the ELC lens and travels without diffusion. To validate the proposed method, we simulated the luminance distributions of the wide-view and narrow-view modes by using a finite difference method (FDM) and Taguchi’s design of experiments method. The simulation results show that the light distribution of the wide-view mode was 84.3% similar to the ideal Lambertian distribution and was wider than that of IPS-LCDs with wide viewing angle characteristics. In addition, the light distribution of the narrow-view mode had a full width at half maximum of 7°. The luminance of the exiting light at viewing angles of 20° and above was calculated to be close to 0.