Writing and optical characteristics of anti-glare screens for educational applications

As electronic displays have become to be used under ambient illumination environment, the situations have been increased which the screens are exposed to the various types of ambient light sources. Since the reflection of ambient light by the screen generally results in the lack of visibility of the displayed contents, anti-glare layer (AGL) on top of the screen has been applied to suppress unwanted reflection. Meanwhile, handheld digital devices have been actively adopted to enhance the quality of learning experiences. Although it was pointed out that the impact of glare may lead to shorter viewing distance or poor posture of the students, there was not enough information regarding the relation between writing and optical characteristics of the anti-glare screen. The purpose of this study is to provide information, which will help to select the appropriate screens for each application. Through the experiments with different AGLs and the displays, coefficient of friction, gloss value, sparkle contrast, and display modulation transfer function (MTF) were selected to characterize the writing and the optical characteristics. While the trend of the gloss values was similar to that of the display MTF, the trend of the sparkle contrast was different from them. These results were summarized as radar charts.