Apple Patent Reveals a Clip-On Prescription Lenses System for a Future HMD (Eyeglasses and/or MR Headset)
Patently Apple first covered an Apple patent filed in Europe regarding the use of prescription lens technology in a future mixed reality headset back in 2018. Since that time, we've covered at least three others you could review here: 01, 02 and 03.
Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that relates to head-mounted devices (HMDs) that may be used with clip-on attachable lenses.
Apple's invention covers devices, systems, and methods that use machine readable markings on a transparent surface to identify information about the transparent surface. For example, the transparent surface may be a prescription lens insert for an HMD and the information may be prescription parameters of the prescription lens insert.
In some instances, clip-on prescription lenses are attached to the HMD (e.g., between a display in the HMD and the user's eyes), but to operate correctly, the HMD needs to know which prescription lenses are currently attached.
In some implementations, the markings are configured to not interfere with “normal” use of the transparent surface, e.g., a user looking through the transparent surface or eye tracking during use of the transparent surface.
In some implementations, markings on the transparent surface are not visible to the user of the HMD. In some implementations the markings on the transparent surface are generally visible to an eye tracking image sensor and/or become visible to the eye tracking image sensor only at selective times.
Various implementations disclosed herein include devices, systems, and methods that provide machine readable markings on attachable corrective lenses to identify which specific corrective lens or lenses are attached to an HMD.
For example, the right and left corrective lenses may have different prescriptions and based on the markings, the HMD can determine and/or notify the user if the right and left corrective lenses are reversed.
In another example, multiple users of the HMD may have their own corrective lenses and based on the markings, the HMD can determine and/or notify the user if the incorrect prescriptive lenses are attached.
In addition, the markings on the corrective lenses may be used to ensure that the corrective lenses are attached to the HMD in the correct position and orientation. Further, the markings on the corrective lenses may be used to identify that the user is colorblind or a specific type of colorblindness, which allows corrective processing (e.g., increase contrast or modify selective colors) by the HMD.
Apple's patent FIG. 1 below illustrates that the invention relates to a Head Mounted Device (HMD) with a corrective lens system. The corrective lenses could be attached to the HMD to assist a user to accurately see objects and text in the real world.
Apple's patent FIG. 2 below is an example corrective lens that includes machine readable markings. The spatial frequency of the markings (#250) in the corrective lens (#200) is not perceivable to the unaided human eye.
Apple's patent FIG. 7 above is a flowchart illustrating an exemplary method of using a marking on a transparent surface to identify information about the transparent surface.
Apple's patent FIG. 3 below is a diagram that shows a FOV of an image sensor of the electronic device with respect to attached corrective lenses; FIGS. 4A-4B illustrate exemplary configurations of an electronic device for markings of corrective lenses that include an excitation spectrum and an emission spectrum; FIGS. 5A-5B illustrate exemplary configurations of an electronic device for markings of corrective lenses that include an exposure spectrum and a detection spectrum; and FIGS. 6A-6B illustrate exemplary configurations of an electronic device for markings of corrective lenses that use a projection surface in accordance with some implementations.
In some implementations, markings #550 in FIG. 5 above, are used to embed data in corrective lenses #200 include reversible photochromic materials that change their reflectance properties over a part of the electromagnetic spectrum (e.g., within the detection spectrum of the detecting image sensor) from transparent to opaque (e.g., detectably darker) when exposed to a higher-energy spectrum/illumination, for example, UV illumination.
Although Apple doesn't discuss how the clip-on prescription lenses would work in this patent, Patently Apple covered another Apple patent that specifically covered this here. Our cover graphic above presents a patent figure from that patent – being that it's a part of this particular project.
For those wanting to take a deep dive into the details of Apple's invention, review patent application US 20220391608 A1.
Apple Inventors
Anselm Grundhöfer: AR/VR Algorithms Engineer. Came to Apple from Disney Research / Head of Projection Technology
Daniel Kurz: Senior Machine Learning Manager
Gupta; Tushar: No published profile on LinkedIn was found
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