Last week Patently Apple posted a patent application report titled "Apple Invents a 360° Head-Mounted Display System that Relates to Post-Production of VR Applications." Apple's invention related to monoscopic, stereoscopic, 180 degree (hemisphere) or 360 degree (full sphere) photography and post-production for distribution to dome, mobile or head-mounted display virtual reality applications.

Today, another Augmented Reality patent application has surfaced with one of the inventors listed as Lejing Wang, an IP Property Manager at Metaio that Apple acquired in 2015. Wang didn't stay on with Apple according to his LinkedIn profile.

The second engineer listed on the patent is Salim BenHimane who interestingly just joined Apple's Computer Vision team this past August. He previously worked on Intel's RealSense team as technical lead from April 2014 until August 2017 and on this very original patent from Metaio back in 2012.

For BenHimane, being reunited with his patent is a strange turn of events to be sure and being the only one originally noted on the patent as an inventor, we can be assured that he was in charge of refining the current patent claims published yesterday.

Yesterday's published patent application appears to be an extension of a patent by the same title that Patently Apple covered as a granted patent back in June. Our report was titled "Apple Wins an AR Patent that made their WWDC 2017 Demo of moving Virtual IKEA Furniture on a table Come to Life."

Although yesterday's published filing wasn't a continuation patent, Apple has indeed altered a few of the patent claims found in their earlier granted patent. Patent claims are 'legally' the most important part of an invention as the finer points of a patent's claims are what companies fight over in a court of law.

Out of twenty patent claims, #9 through #20 have been changed as noted below. To compare the claims for yourself, see patent application 20170301141 and granted patent 9,685,004

New or Extended Patent Claims to this Invention

Claim #9. The method according to claim 1, wherein the visualization comprises a visualization for delivering information to the user that is associated with at least one part of the real environment; and enhancing the user's visual perception of one or more of the digital information and the real environment by superimposing the digital information onto the real environment in a correct perspective, and wherein the adjusting of at least one of the parameter and the operating flow is based, at least in part, on the visualization.

Claim #10. The method according to claim 1, wherein, the adjusting of one or more of the parameter and the operating flow is based, at least in part, on a visually perceivable property of the digital information or of the real environment, the visually perceivable property includes one or more of: a spatial property associated with one or more of the digital information and the real environment, a symmetry associated with one or more of the digital information and the real environment, a behavior associated with one or more of the digital information and the real environment, a color associated with one or more of the digital information and the real environment, a type of the digital information, and a type of the real environment.

Claim #11. The method according to claim 10, wherein, the visually perceivable property includes the behavior, the behavior comprising data describing a position or a change in the position of at least one part of the digital information or the real environment, and wherein the visually perceivable property includes the type of digital information comprising one or more of a text, a drawing, and a video.

Claim #12. The method according to claim 1, wherein the display device comprises a device displaying one or more of the digital information and the real environment to the user such that the user can visually perceive the real environment through the device.

Claim #13. The method according to claim 1, wherein the adjusting of one or more of the parameter and the operating flow is based on a manner in which the user is viewing the visualization, the manner comprising one or more of eye gazing and eye focusing.

Claim # 14. The method according to claim 1, further comprising: quantifying a performance of the vision-based processing or tracking technique based on a similarity measure of sum-of-squared differences, wherein the similarity measure is defined, at least in part, by a similarity threshold value; and adjusting the similarity threshold value.

Claim #15. The method according to claim 1, wherein, the digital information includes a spherical object, and wherein the vision-based processing or tracking technique includes optimizing at least one parameter describing a translation of the spherical object, without considering a parameter describing a rotation of the spherical object.

Claim #16. The method according to claim 1, wherein the visualization includes an animation of the digital information including a movement of the digital information and wherein the vision-based processing or tracking technique does not include a stable pose estimation of a camera capturing the image.

Claim #17. The method according to claim 16, wherein a number of feature correspondences employed to estimate the stable pose is decreased.

Claim #18. The method according to claim 1, wherein the adjusting at least one of the parameter and the operating flow of the vision-based processing or tracking technique is based on one or more of: a usage of the image processing; a usage of the visualization; a visually perceivable property of one or more of the digital information and the real environment; a property of the display device employed in the visualization; and a manner in which a user is viewing the visualization.

Claim #19. A non-transitory computer readable medium comprising instructions for image processing in an augmented reality application, which when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to: receive an image of a real environment; process the image in an augmented reality application by a vision-based processing or tracking technique to overlay a visualization of digital information onto the image of the real environment or a view of the real environment; adjust a threshold of re-projection error of the visualization of digital information based on a pixel density of a display device; adjust at least one of a parameter and an operating flow of the vision-based processing or tracking technique; and present the visualization of digital information using the display device.

Claim #20. A system for image processing in an augmented reality application, comprising: memory storing data, the data including one or more computer-readable instructions; a display device coupled to the memory; and one or more processors coupled to the display device and the memory, the one or more processors being configured to execute the computer-readable instructions to: receive an image of a real environment; process the image in an augmented reality application by a vision-based processing or tracking technique to overlay a visualization of digital information onto the image of the real environment or a view of the real environment; adjust a threshold of re-projection error of the visualization of digital information based on a pixel density of a display device; adjust at least one of a parameter and an operating flow of the vision-based processing or tracking technique, wherein the adjustment of one or more of the parameter and the operating flow is based on one or more of: a usage of the image processing; a usage of the visualization; a visually perceivable property of one or more of the digital information and the real environment; a property of the display device employed in the visualization; and a manner in which a user is viewing the visualization; and present the visualization of digital information using the display device.

Considering that this is a patent application, the timing of such a product to market is unknown at this time – though parts of it could have been used in developing Apple's ARKit or augmented reality app relating to moving virtual furniture in a room on an iOS device.

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