Samsung hasn’t said much officially, but leaks are starting to fill in the gaps on one of the more genuinely useful features coming to the Galaxy S26 Ultra: a built-in Privacy Display that makes your screen invisible to anyone not looking at it straight-on.
The technical explanation, shared by leaker Ice Universe on X, gets into the optics of how this works, and it’s more interesting than a simple filter glued to your screen.
In normal mode, all the layers inside the display share the same refractive index, meaning light passes through freely in every direction. Anyone next to you on a train or in a coffee shop can glance over and read your screen without effort.
Flip the Privacy Display on and the behavior changes entirely. Voltage applied to the display activates a microscopic grating structure at the bottom layer, essentially a grid of tiny channels that functions like the louvers on window blinds. Light trying to escape at wide angles gets diffracted, knocked off its original path before it ever reaches your neighbor’s eyes.
Those redirected light rays then hit a prism-like layer at the top of the display stack. Because of the angle and the refractive index difference, they either distort heavily or bounce straight back into the screen through total internal reflection. The person sitting beside you sees nothing. You, looking directly at the screen, see everything normally.
It is worth flagging that Samsung has not confirmed these details, and the accompanying diagrams show signs of AI generation. Treat this as a credible working theory until Samsung provides its own technical breakdown.
Via – Android Authority
