The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 59 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we cover a granted patent regarding a headset, single lens or full smart glasses invention that includes a head and/or eye tracking system. While the headset or glasses will work with mixed reality games, the unique aspect of this invention is that the headset will be able to work with real world applications like a spreadsheet.

Apple's patent FIG. 1 is a schematic representation of the construction of a first embodiment of a head mounted eye tracking system; FIGS. 2A, B & C represent the styles of headsets the system may work with.

Apple's patent FIGS. 3 and 4 below are applications that the system can work with such as a spreadsheet. This is revealed in FIG. 7 where the patents states: "FIG. 7 shows an embodiment of the method according to the invention on the example of the spreadsheet program Excel and the use of an eye tracker as a tracking device."

Further, the granted patent states that "If a user for example selects a cell in a spreadsheet program by the viewing direction within the scope of the present invention, according to the invention, the cell grid can be provided to the user with a zoom level for this purpose, which is matched to the quality of capture of the image data or to the accuracy of the above mentioned ascertained one parameter with the specially used tracking device or in the certain situation, which is influenced by environmental conditions, or to the certain user."

Input could be via keyboard or via Siri.

The inventor is listed as Eberhard Schmidt of Germany. Schmidt was the former director of SensoMotoric which Apple acquired in 2017. Between September and October Patently Apple has posted other patents that originated with SensoMotoric (01 & 02).

For more details, see Apple's granted patent 10,444,832 which was originally filed in Q4 2017 and published today by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

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