With
the widespread use of electronic display devices such as smartphones
and tablets, the demand for privacy protection has been steadily increasing.
While the traditional shutter privacy films offer a decent antipeeping
effect, they suffer from thickness, high costs, and poor front-facing
transparency, affecting the user experience. To solve this problem,
and also based on the facts that the linearly polarized light (LPL)
emitted by displays and the angular dependence of hybrid-aligned liquid
crystal (LC) for LPL, for the first time, here we develop the optical
composite films for display antipeeping application based on a polarization-dependent
strategy. By combining a hybrid-aligned LC polymer (HLCP) film with
a polarizing film (PF), the flexible composite film exhibits excellent
narrow viewing angle capability while maintaining high front-facing
transmittance, minimizing backlight loss. Furthermore, to achieve
a polarizer-free system, we prepared the dichroic dye-doped HLCP film
and transferred the consequent film onto optical clear adhesive (OCA).
The experimental results confirm that this composite film also exhibits
a narrow viewing angle property, which offers an approach for the
study of display viewing angle control. These two polarized optical
composite films based on HLCP have the potential for practical antipeeping
applications in current mainstream display devices.