Recently, the United States Patent and Trademark Office officially disclosed a series of 11 patent applications related to current or future versions of Apple and Vision Pro. These patents cover a wide range of technologies, including immersive virtual displays, conductive fabric architecture, controlled avatars, and foldable reflective lens modules.
Immersive Virtual Display
One of the most impressive parts of Apple's Vision Pro presentation was illustrating someone at work being able to call up a series of Virtual Displays to work with as shown below.
Patently Apple was first to cover Apple's patent covering a future user being able to work with multiple virtual documents back in March 2018 or seven years before it became a reality. Below is just one of the patent figures from that patent that was updated and published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark area.
Apple's patent focuses on both a user working with virtual documents and webpages and also being able to do so while being a passenger in a future autonomous vehicle. It's irrelevant if the vehicle isn't one from Apple. Apple could easily work with other vehicle manufacturers whenever autonomous vehicles actually come to market.
Today, Apple's new continuation patent kills off the original 20 patent claims and replaces them with 40 new claims to better protect this invention. For more on this, review Apple's patent application 20240078770.
Conductive Fabric Architecture
Apple's patent covers a head-mountable device (Vision Pro) including a display, a housing at least partially surrounding the display, a facial interface attached to the housing, and a cover positioned between the housing and the facial interface, the cover comprising a conductive fabric that is elastic.
Additionally, the conductive fabric can be interwoven with the cover. During use, the geometry of the conductive fabric can change in response to a user input. In other examples, the conductive fabric is configured to detect a change in a distance between the housing and the facial interface.
In yet other examples, the conductive fabric forms a serpentine pattern. In some instances, the conductive fabric includes an array of parallel conductive threads arranged perpendicular to a direction of deformation of the cover, and a distance between two of the parallel conductive threads changes in response to a facial movement of a user. The conductive fabric can include a user input member.
Apple's patent FIG. 3 above highlights the HMDs light seal and conductive fabric which detailed further in patent application 20240077940.
Controlling Avatars within a 3D Environment
Apple's patent covers methods and interfaces for interacting with environments that include at least some virtual elements (e.g., applications, augmented reality environments, mixed reality environments, and virtual reality environments) are cumbersome, inefficient, and limited.
For example, systems that provide insufficient feedback for performing displaying virtual objects, such as avatars, and systems that provide insufficient methods for limiting the display of virtual objects and/or displaying alternative virtual objects that limit information are complex, tedious, and error-prone, create a significant cognitive burden on a user, and detract from the experience with the virtual/augmented reality environment.
In addition, these methods take longer than necessary, thereby wasting energy of the computer system. This latter consideration is particularly important in battery-operated devices.
Accordingly, there is a need for computer systems with improved methods and interfaces for providing computer-generated avatars of users that make interaction with the computer systems more efficient and intuitive for a user. Such methods and interfaces optionally complement or replace conventional methods for providing extended reality experiences to users that are in communication sessions (such as FaceTime).
The image above is from Apple's Vision Pro presentation illustrating the realism of a user's avatar can be compared to the cartoon figures found on Meta's Headsets for the creepy Metaverse.
In some embodiments, the live communication session could be a game session, a video conference session, a collaboration session, and/or an event session.
This is a deep patent covering detailed patent figures about the Vision Pro headset and controlling Avatars in Vision Pro.
Translated from: patentlyapple
English 
Chinese