One of the last Senior Industrial Designers at Apple from the Jony Ive era is stepping down after 20 years of service
Today Apple was granted 37 patents covering Crack Resistant Display Cover Layers for Future Foldable Devices and more

Apple wins a patent for Deformation Sensors in Smartglasses that correct visual misalignment due to a drop event, thermal fluctuations+

1 cover Smartglasses

Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially granted Apple a patent that relates to future smartglasses. More specifically, the patent covers the use of new Deformation Sensors to ensure that the AR visuals presented to a user are kept properly aligned due to a drop event, drastic changes in weather and more.

In Apple's patent background they noted that electronic devices such as head-mounted devices have housings that are configured to be worn on a head of a user. During use of a head-mounted device, there is risk that components in the device may become misaligned due to deformation of the housing. For example, display components may become misaligned, which could adversely affect the ability of a user to satisfactorily view images.

Electronic Devices With Deformation Sensors

Apple's granted patent that was never made public before covers a head-mounted device may have head-mounted support structures configured to be worn on a head of a user. The head-mounted support structures of a head-mounted device may include a bridge and temples to form a pair of glasses or may include housing walls and other housing structures that form goggles or other head-mounted device structures.

The head-mounted device may have stereo optical components such as left and right cameras or left and right display systems. The optical components may have respective left and right pointing vectors. For example, cameras may have pointing vectors associated with the directions in which the cameras are capturing images and display systems may have pointing vectors associated with the directions in which the display systems emit images.

A left camera may capture images along a left camera pointing vector and a right camera may capture images along a right camera pointing vector. A left display system may have an output coupler or other display component that supplies a left image to a left eye box along a left display system pointing vector. A right display system may have an output coupler or other display component that supplies a right image to a right eye box along a right system pointing vector.

Deformation of the support structures due to forces from mounting a device on a user's head, due to damage from a drop event, due to thermal fluctuations, or due to other events, may cause the camera pointing vectors and/or the display system pointing vectors to become misaligned. Sensor circuitry such as strain gauge circuitry may measure pointing vector misalignment. Control circuitry in the device may use sensor measurements to compensate for changes in the orientations of the pointing vectors with respect to each other.

For example, the control circuitry may process image data captured using the left and right cameras to compensate for changes in the left and right camera pointing vector directions with respect to each other, thereby producing satisfactory stereo captured images. To compensate for changes in the left and right display system pointing vector orientations with respect to each other, the control circuitry may adjust the images produced by the left and/or right display systems (e.g., to adjust keystoning, to crop images, and/or to adjust other image attributes). In this way, the left and right images will fuse properly in the user's vision and will not suffer from distortion due to misalignment of the pointing vectors.

In an illustrative configuration, the head-mounted support structures are configured so that images for the left and right eye boxes will be satisfactorily aligned with respect to each other even if side portions of the head-mounted support structures are deformed.

Apple's patent FIG. 1 below presents a pair of smartglasses. Display systems #14 may be opaque or transparent. During operation, the display systems may be used in displaying images for a user. The images may include, for example, computer-generated images containing text, computer-generated objects, and other virtual image content. If desired, device 10 (smartglasses) may have forward-facing cameras such as cameras #30L and #30R.

It may be desirable to configure the housing (#12) so the portion #12B (e.g., the bridge in a pair of glasses) does not deform excessively. Deformation of portion #12B may lead to misalignment between the left and right pointing vectors of cameras and display. Excessive misalignment of displayed images may lead to user discomfort and poor stereo image quality (e.g., situations where the user cannot readily fuse the left and right images into a satisfactory fused stereo image). Misalignment of cameras #30L and #30R may adversely affect stereo image capture operations.

The smartglasses may be subject to deformation when it experiences an unintended drop event, exposed to large temperature fluctuations that cause different materials in the housing to expand or contact by disparate amounts, when structures glasses expand/or contract due to aging, when a user places stress on them during use, or in other situations that place stress on the structures of the housing.

One way to combat misalignment issues involves creating strong (e.g., stiff and inflexible) mechanical structures in the frame. There is a limit, however, to the extent to which the glasses can be strengthened without adversely affecting the weight, size, and comfort of the glasses.

To avoid the need to create overly heavy and bulky support structures, the glasses can be provided with sensors that monitor deformations in the support structures. These sensors may be electrical sensors, capacitive sensors, resistive sensors, magnetic sensors, optical sensors, acoustic sensors, and/or other sensors.

2 SMARTGLASSES PATENT - APPLE

Apple's patent FIG. 2 above is a rear view of the glasses in an illustrative configuration in which a set of three strain gauges #40 are used to  measure optical pointing vector misalignment. The strain gauges may include meandering sensor lines that change resistance as a function of the amount of bending in the strain gauge.

Apple's patent FIG. 4 above is a flow chart of illustrative operations associated with operating the glasses. During the operations of block #46, the control circuitry #20 may use sensors #16 to characterize the amount of deformation present in the glasses housing.

As shown in FIG. 5 above, is a top view of a portion of an illustrative head-mounted device that may be deformed.  

For more details, review Apple's granted patent 11846782.

10.52FX - Granted Patent Bar

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.