Renewed Patents Suggest Apple AR Glasses May Start To Take Shape

We got some new information from Ming-Chi Kuo - the famous Apple soothsayer. Recently he has stated that the next groundbreaking user interface of Apple will be in the shape of glasses of augmented reality. From the Cupertino-based company, they expect to launch these glasses by 2020. They have also renewed a patent and took a look at this patent will help us imagine the shape of these new AR glasses.

This patent has been published by the US Office of Patent and Trademark, and with this patent, we have more concrete evidence that Apple is working toward an AR release from the claim back in July of 2017. This patent proposes a system of digital makers on improving the FOW ( Field of View) and allows the user to interact with the glasses with gesture controls.

What will it be used for?

Still, we could see a lot of possibilities from this patent. Maybe it could serve as a tour guide guiding you on your overseas trip, I could imagine that the system utilizes its new technologies to annotate and highlight the points of interest in your tour. We could also use this system to track our lost devices. In the majority of the blueprints in the patent, the AR glasses work in connection with an iPhone, but in the last two blueprints show another AR glasses which are fully independent without connecting to any second device.

We know that the system will be much easier to make if it is linked to a smartphone. If they want to put onboard hardware on the glasses the pair will turn out much bigger and bulkier - as big as the prototype version of HoloLens 2. But still, that option remains on the table.

New depth sensor

There are also rumors about a new depth sensor for future iPhones with lidar technology which currently exist in autonomous cars. This technology will use a laser to measure the distance from the sensor to the object base on the speed of the bounced back laser. This could improve greatly how iPhones deal with its AR feature.

At last, Apple is on the track of recruiting many AR developers for ARKit platform, which was released in Worldwide Developer Conference 2018. This is a very important step of Apple toward creating a marketplace for AR Apps. In that event, Apple also introduced the ARKit version 2 which is integrated into the iOS toolkit of the developer.