Recently the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially granted Apple 46 utility patents. The single patent reviewed in this report relates to future smartglasses with a dual gaze tracking system. And as always, we wrap up this week's granted patent report with our traditional listing of the remaining granted patents that were issued to Apple this week.
Head-mounted Devices With Dual Gaze Tracking Systems
Apple's granted patent relates to gaze tracking systems that may be used to gather information on the direction of the user's gaze.The head-mounted support structure may form a pair of glassesor other head-mounted housing. The glasses may include, for example, a frame and a pair of temples or other elongated side support members that are coupled to the frame by hinges.
Glasses lenses (e.g., transparent lens members with or without an associated lens power) may be supported by the frame. Display systems on the left and right sides of the device may provide computer-generated images to the user while the user is viewing real-world objects through the lenses. In some configurations, selectable menus and other selectable items may be displayed over real-world images.
The gaze tracking systems may include image-sensor-based systems such as eye-glint-based systems. A glint-based gaze tracking system may include light-emitting devices that emit light beams that create eye glints on the surface of a user's eyes and may include an image sensor that measures the eye glints. The pattern of eye glints may be analyzed to produce information on the user's gaze.
The gaze tracking systems may also include a low-power gaze tracking system. The low-power gaze tracking system may use light detectors to measure light reflections from the user's eyes. The light reflections may correspond to reflections of the light beams emitted by the light-emitting devices used by the glint-based gaze tracking system. The user's gaze may be measured by analyzing the magnitudes of the detected light reflections.
The head-mounted device may use different gaze tracking systems in different operating modes. For example, a glint-based gaze tracking system or other system based on an image sensor may, in a given mode of operation, be used to gather gaze information to supplement and/or replace gaze tracking information from a low-power gaze tracking system. In another mode of operation, the low power gaze tracking system may be used to track the user's gaze without using the glint-based gaze tracking system.
Apple's patent FIG. 4 below is a side view of an illustrative glint-based gaze tracking system; FIG. 5 is a side view of an illustrative low-power gaze tracking system of the type that may share light-emitting devices with the glint-based gaze tracking system of FIG. 4.
Apple's patent FIG. 8 above is a diagram showing operations involved in using an HMD/Smartglasses. In the illustrative example of FIG. 8, the glasses have both a low-power gaze tracking system (e.g., a system with light-emitting devices #40E and detectors #40D) for gathering gaze tracking information and has an image-sensor gaze tracking system (e.g., a glint-based gaze tracker having an image sensor and an infrared illumination system formed from light-emitting devices #40E). The glint-based system may consume more power than the low-powered system due to the presence of components such as camera #40D. To conserve power, it may sometimes be desired to turn off the glint-based system in favor of the low-powered system.
Translated from: patentlyapple
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