A computer screen that looks blank to anyone not wearing a pair of special polarising glasses has been developed by a Tokyo-based electronics company, Iizuka Denki Kogyo.
The company believes the modified LCD monitor will appeal to financial institutions that need to keep sensitive information safe from prying eyes in a busy environment.
Only authorised viewers wearing the special glasses would be able to read data on the screen. Anyone looking over their shoulder would see nothing at all. “To others, you would look like someone with sunglasses working in front of a totally white screen,” said an official in charge of development at IDK.
The displayed data is rendered invisible by doing away with a light-polarising screen from the front of the monitor. All LCD’s use this filter to block some of the polarised light that passes through liquid crystals controlled by an electrical current. This makes it possible to display information by defining different parts of the screen in light and colour.
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In the IDK system, the polarising filter is effectively moved from the screen to the pair of glasses worn by authorised computer users.
3D glasses
Markus Kuhn, an expert in computer display security at Cambridge University, says the idea would be relatively simple to implement. But he warns that this security measure could be defeated by anyone who can get hold of a pair of correctly configured, light polarising glasses.
Alternatively, Kuhn told New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ, simple 3D movie glasses could defeat the system. These have a horizontal polarising filter on one eye and a vertical filter on the other eye.
“By tilting the head up to 45 degrees to either side and switching between both eyes, you can easily observe light at all polarisation angles,” he says. Kuhn adds that an opaque shielding device might be simpler way to obstruct prying eyes.
The 15-inch IDK screens are expected to go on sale at the end of 2002 and to cost between $1600 and $2500.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
