Apple's Head-Tracking Media Display System Patent

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I am not a big fan of all the things Apple tries to patent but this head-tracking media display system, if done right, could be very cool.

From the claims of the patent, the device looks not unlike a pair of goggles that display a cropped version of a larger media file. As the wearer moves his or her head, a gyroscope and accelerometer in the goggles adjust the crop of the media file, making it appear to the user as if they were in a theater-like experience.
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Nothing like sitting at your desk with a pair of snow goggles to make you the coolest guy around.

Maybe I will pick up a pair at lunch to see if it helps me with the ladies....
 
Is it just me or have we had this around for awhile now? If it's really goggle-sized, may be smaller I guess.
 
Nomad said:
Nothing like sitting at your desk with a pair of snow goggles to make you the coolest guy around.

Maybe I will pick up a pair at lunch to see if it helps me with the ladies....
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If Apple's making it, then you can count on all the "cool" guys and gals having it :p
 
TechieSooner said:
Is it just me or have we had this around for awhile now? If it's really goggle-sized, may be smaller I guess.
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The current ones show you the whole picture of what you are watching. This one crops it so you can only see part of the movie, and you turn your head to look at the other parts like sitting really close in a theater where you have to turn your head left and right.
 
At first I was like "Hell yea! FPS immersion here we come!"

Then I thought about it and realized that would be one hell of a tech feat, to isolate aiming with a mouse and looking with the goggles, plus the game would probably have to be coded for something like that.

Cool stuff for future ideas though.
 
Casus said:
At first I was like "Hell yea! FPS immersion here we come!"
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I saw some guy at a LAN party with some goggles that he'd use to play FPSes with. Kinda cool I guess but meh, I'm not so into it. IMO that sort of thing is really gimmicky and not that useful. Unless someone can make something out of goggles that improves things in a way that no other physical control or on-screen user interface method can do, I don't really see a point.
 
Hrmm.... I was at the Air and Space Museum Yesterday and I saw the first VR goggles. Built by NASA. In 1985.

So all that they're patenting is that rather then changing what is rendered, they change which part of the file you see. Uh wow, this is huge. :rolleyes:

I hope they listed NASA's (and Nintendo's) VR goggles as prior art on their patent application.

(I was early for my flight and had time to kill, better the Smithsonian than the airport.)
 
I know some would still fight me to the death on this, but it further reinforces the fact: Apple just repackages old technology in a new shiny case.
Period.
Apple = Marketing, not Innovation.
 
TechieSooner said:
I know some would still fight me to the death on this, but it further reinforces the fact: Apple just repackages old technology in a new shiny case.
Period.
Apple = Marketing, not Innovation.
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Says the guy who insists that Microsoft invented touchscreens, mutltitouch, gesture based touch interfaces, and projected touch surfaces with their billions in research. :rolleyes:
 
Serpico said:
Says the guy who insists that Microsoft invented touchscreens, mutltitouch, gesture based touch interfaces, and projected touch surfaces with their billions in research. :rolleyes:
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As every other time I say it... PROVE IT.
Show me where I said that.
 
TechieSooner said:
As every other time I say it... PROVE IT.
Show me where I said that.
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http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1033254667&postcount=117

Using Surface as an example of Microsoft "inventing" technology is laughable. It is impressive but it is exactly what you criticize Apple for in the same breath, which is repackaging separate existing technologies and services into a new product. That you can say this about Microsoft when their business for 30 years has almost entirely been based on iterating on other companies' ideas is even stranger.

The only thing more laughable is in the same post you accuse Apple of copying a touchscreen phone that hit the streets only three months before the iPhone did. :rolleyes:
 
Ualdayan said:
The current ones show you the whole picture of what you are watching. This one crops it so you can only see part of the movie, and you turn your head to look at the other parts like sitting really close in a theater where you have to turn your head left and right.
Click to expand...

If it ever reaches the market and it shows its worth with whatever software or services Apple ties into it, maybe, but I still don't see a point.
 
Most pointless idea ever. A HMD that lets you see only a small part of the film you are watching. You have to move your head to see parts of the film that are cropped. How is this a cinema like experience?. When i'm at the cinema i can see the entire screen. This is more like trying to watch a film at the cinema through a keyhole.

Waste of a patent
 
Skirrow said:
This is more like trying to watch a film at the cinema through a keyhole.
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Right to the point and I totally agree. Just because something can be made in a lab doesn't mean it has any real utility to it. I'll be surprised if it ever gets to market.
 
TechieSooner said:
Where that fails is the fact you used a strawman argument.
I never said Microsoft invented touchscreens or multitouch or projectors.
However nobody has had (And in that thread I asked you to prove this as well: still waiting on that to happen) anything like this before, especially since you claim it existed back in 1984 :rolleyes:
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Your claim was that "Microsoft is actually inventing technology". My argument is that they are not, and that instead they are repackaging and combining existing technologies and services to create new products, which is again the same thing you criticize Apple for doing with things like the iPhone. Multitouch has been around forever but Apple is the first company that incorporated that technology and gestures into laptop trackpads (right click, page scrolling, going forward and backward through pages, image rotation, text resizing, app switching, and Expose can all be done with 2, 3, and 4 finger multitouch and gestures) and touchscreen cell phones. They didn't invent it but they sure as hell made it useful. Ditto with Microsoft and doing such a thing with large tables and integrating it with online services like sharing assets between your other devices, digging through contextual information, or billing (all of this is huge).

As far as the effect with the paper goes, I've seen it years ago in touchscreen installations (still digging for a Youtube link). I saw one in person at the interactive lab at my alma mater NYU when I went back to visit. I have also seen it done (albiet much more expensively) in a demo by Sony back in 2000 or so (also digging for a Youtube link). Instead of using sheets of paper it used additional small LCD screens (yeah, really) that you would hold above the main screen. The cool thing about it is that the functions of the small LCDs could be linked together to create additional desktops or functions that would float on top of the main surface (think of it like having another application window open on a regular computer desktop). Prohibitively expensive, almost certainly a PITA to keep tabs of battery life on all the pieces, but kinda cool from an "oh, they can do that" point of view.

Here is a very cool history of multitouch that two seconds with Google found me (you should try it sometime instead of insisting I retrieve anything that conflicts with your opinion for you) compiled by an researcher at Microsoft: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

And like I said, there is nothing wrong with any of this; core technologies created in a research lab are useless if they can't get a function or utility applied to them. They are simply building blocks. The bulk of Thomas Edison's work was not original technologies, but instead they were refined products that were built upon the basic technological findings of other inventors. The products that we see out of a company like Apple or Microsoft that actually get to market are probably outnumbered by a huge factor by the things that are passed on (and I suspect that these goggles will end up on the "never mind" pile).

Either way, the idea that Microsoft is "inventing" anything while using the same argument to criticize other companies is ridiculous considering that MS are doing the exact same thing that everyone else is, which is refining existing technologies into useful products.

On a side note, here is the first touchscreen smartphone, IBM and Bell South's Simon, released in 1993:

131450-04_bellSouthSimon.jpg


It had a calender, address book, email, calculator, notepad, games, all with a predictive touchscreen QWERTY keyboard. What a piece of history that would be to have in your collection.
 
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