A Reflective Display Textile With Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Fibers for Bright-Light Environments

As display technology shifts from simple illumination to versatile human-computer interaction, visibility in bright environments and human adaptability (i.e., flexibility) become increasingly important. Reflective displays offer a compelling advantage for outdoor use due to their sunlight readability and low power consumption. Particularly, liquid crystals are ideal for fabricating full-color flexible displays because of their rich color gamut and soft-matter nature. However, integrating cholesteric liquid crystals onto fibrous substrates remains challenging due to coating instability caused by highly curved surface and insufficient mechanical robustness under bending and stretching. Herein, a coaxial winding structure is employed to suppress instability during coating. And a polymer dispersed liquid crystal system is introduced to stabilize the liquid crystals with maintained electric-field response. Subsequently, multicolor pixels were formed by interfacing with transparent conductive fibers, achieving a contrast ratio of 2.09 even under 10 000 lux ambient light. These interconnected structures formed woven arrays that electrically switch between reflective and transparent states. The textile showed excellent spatial uniformity with less than 5% contrast fluctuation. Moreover, we demonstrated digital displays and visual camouflage applications based on the liquid crystal textiles, which validates this platform for high-ambient-light applications.