Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 61 newly granted utility patents for Apple Inc. In this particular report we briefly cover for HMD related patents along with one covering Ray Tracing.  And as always, we wrap up this week's granted patent report with our traditional listing of the remaining granted patents that were issued to Apple this week.

Optical Systems With Green-heavy Illumination Sequences For FLCOS Display Panels

Apple's granted patent covers a display may include illumination optics, a ferroelectric liquid crystal on silicon (fLCOS) panel, and a waveguide. 

The illumination optics may include a red, green, and blue light sources. The fLCOS panel may produce image light by modulating a series of image frames onto illumination light. Control circuitry may control the illumination optics to produce the illumination light for each image frame in the series of image frames according to a green-heavy illumination sequence that includes first, second, and third time periods. The green light source may be active during each of the first, second, and third time periods. This may allow the green light source to be driven with a lower current density than the other light sources without significantly reducing image quality at an eye box. The lower current density may match the peak efficiency of the green light source, thereby minimizing power consumption by the display.

An illustrative system having a device with one or more near-eye display systems is shown in FIG. 1 below. System #10 may be a head-mounted device having one or more displays such as near-eye displays #14 mounted within support structure (housing) #20. Support structure may have the shape of a pair of eyeglasses.

(Click on image to enlarge)

For more details, review granted patent 11829039.

Today's other Vision Pro (HMD) Granted Patents

11829528 Eye Tracking System:

An eye tracking system for detecting position and movements of a user's eyes in a head-mounted display (HMD). The eye tracking system includes at least one eye tracking camera, an illumination source that emits infrared light towards the user's eyes, and diffraction gratings located at the eyepieces. The diffraction gratings redirect or reflect at least a portion of infrared light reflected off the user's eyes, while allowing visible light to pass. The cameras capture images of the user's eyes from the infrared light that is redirected or reflected by the diffraction gratings.

11828944 Head-mounted Device With Optical Module Illumination Systems:

To accommodate variations in the interpupillary distances associated with different users, a head-mounted device may have left-eye and right-eye optical modules that move with respect to each other. Each optical module may have a display that creates an image and a corresponding lens that provides the image to an associated eye box for viewing by a user. The optical modules each include a lens barrel to which the display and lens of that optical module are mounted and a head-mounted optical module illumination system. The illumination system may have light-emitting devices such as light-emitting diodes that extend along some or all of a peripheral edge of the display. The light-emitting diodes may be mounted on a flexible printed circuit with a tail that extends a lens barrel opening. A stiffener for the flexible printed circuit may have openings that receive the light-emitting diodes.

11828940 System And Method For User Alerts During An Immersive Computer-generated Reality Experience:

Systems and methods for computer-generated reality user hailing are described. Some implementations may include accessing sensor data captured using one or more sensors; detecting a person within a distance of a head-mounted display based on the sensor data; detecting a hail event based on the sensor data; and responsive to the hail event, invoking an alert using the head-mounted display.

Ray Tracing Patent

Today, Apple was granted patent 11830124 titled (Ray Tracing) "Quantized Ray Intersection Testing With Definitive Hit Detection": 

Techniques are disclosed relating to intersection tests for ray tracing in graphics processors. In some embodiments, test circuitry is configured to perform intersection tests that operate on reduced-precision representations of rays that were generated by quantizing initial representations of the rays and reduced-precision representations of primitives that were generated by quantizing initial representations of the primitives. Some reduced-precision tests (e.g., for any-hit rays) may generate a definitive hit according to the initial representations. In this situation, graphics processing circuitry may record an intersection with the reduced-precision representation of the primitive for the ray based on the first result, without performing an intersection test for the first ray using the initial representation of the ray and the primitive. Disclosed techniques may advantageously reduce power consumption, improve performance, or both.

In June 2023 Ray Tracing came to the M3 Mac Pro for the first time. Apple notes in their MacBook Pro literature that "For the first time, MacBook Pro features hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Combined with the new graphics architecture, it enables pro apps to deliver up to two and a half times faster rendering performance and allows games to provide more realistic shadows and reflections."

This Week's Remaining Granted Patents