Patently Apple has covered a number of patents over the last two years that originated from Apple's acquisition of SensoMotoric (01, 02, 03, 04 and 05) relating to eye tracking systems integrated into future MR glasses. Today Apple has updated a patent that they were granted back in February which shows great interest in this bionic virtual meeting room for their future smartglasses or head mounted displays (HMD) device. According to Apple, different kinds of virtual meetings will be made possible in the future that could be applicable to a business meeting, a social media virtual private meeting with friends and even for gamer teams. Apple's latest version of this patent has added needed features to make virtual meetings a success in the future.

The bionic virtual meeting room application could be used with a number of communication devices that may be computers, mobile virtual reality or augmented reality glasses, tablets or smartphones, which can be communicatively coupled for example over a network, like the internet.

 It is also known, in the majority of cases in the context of games, to animate avatars, which usually are prototyped and which are shown in games to represent a user. The main area of application of such virtual realities lies in the field of entertainment and games.

It would also be desirable to make use of such virtual realities also in other fields, especially in the field of human interaction. However, other aspects have to be taken into consideration taking account of specific requirements of such different fields of application.

Apple's patent FIG. 1 below is a schematic illustration of a communication system according to an embodiment of the invention; FIG. 2 a schematic illustration of a communication system providing a virtual meeting room for a plurality of participants.

In today's patent update, Apple has canceled the first 14 patent claims that were present when they first acquired the company and its patents. The original patent focused on a "method" of displaying a virtual meeting and secondly on "a communication device" that would work in a mixed-reality environment.  

Apple's patent update focuses on the same two priorities with completely different details now that the original patent has been granted. Now Apple engineers have taken over the project and have redefined the technology according to how they envision it being executed in the future on smartglasses and so forth.

Firstly, Apple has placed emphasis on two or more people in the meeting being verified via biometric characteristics that could include a bodily gesture, a facial feature, a facial expression, an eye feature while including other characteristics such as hair color, eye color and/or skin color.

Secondly, Apple has updated aspects of the devices used in bionic virtual meetings. Apple notes that their devices will include biometric sensors to detect biometric characteristics.

Apple notes that the devices will have one or more processors to determine a level of abstraction associated with the users as a level of abstraction associated with the virtual meeting space.

Due to the fact that users will be represented as avatars (or Memoji) in this future virtual meeting room, the devices have to first and foremost be able to confirm the true identities of the individuals in the meeting via biometrics.

Apple's continuation patent application 20200143578 that was published today by the U.S. Patent Office was filed back January 8, 2020. Apple's first granted patent was issued in February 2020. Considering that this is a patent application, the timing of such a product to market is unknown at this time.