The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 65 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we cover Apple's granted patent 9,333,424 that relates to interactive gaming on an iPhone; gaming such as laser tag or paint ball.

Technically speaking, Apple's invention covers an interactive game environment which includes two or more co-located, networked, direction and location aware interactive game devices / iPhones. The game devices share a common reference coordinate frame (e.g., a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate frame). Each game device maintains its own device state (e.g., position, orientation, time) in the reference coordinate frame. Each interactive game device shares its device state with the other interactive game devices using communication technology (e.g., Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular).

Each interactive game device can use the device states of the other interactive game devices to project the relative positions and orientations of the other interactive game devices into a local, fixed coordinate frame of the interactive game device. These projections allow each interactive gaming device to know the position and orientation of the other interactive game devices in an interactive game environment defined by the reference coordinate frame. An interactive game display can be generated and displayed on each game device. Various interactive games (e.g., Laser Tag) can utilize the relative positions and orientations shared between the interactive game devices to provide an enriched interactive gaming experience.

Apple's patent FIG. 3 noted above illustrates an interactive game display; FIG. 4 is an example process performed by an interactive game device. For more details on this invention, see Apple's invention here.

Patently Apple presents only a brief summary of granted patents with associated graphics for journalistic news purposes as each Granted Patent is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any Granted Patent should be read in its entirety for full details. About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments.