As published today by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple has just patented an Augmented Reality (AR) system called "Visual-based inertial navigation", which describes a three-dimensional positioning system for a device using cameras and sensors.
Is the first patent that Apple publishes of RA since its acquisition at the beginning of years of a start-up that was dedicated to the development of this technology.
The system combines a camera on board the device, making use of a gyroscope and accelerometers as sensors, to conconstruct an image of the position in real time of the device in nearby physical space.
The patent describes how visual inertial navigation systems can achieve positional awareness quite accurately, without the need for GPS or mobile network. The big problem with this new technology could be the high demand for CPU and other resources that it could produce in the device, due to the need to continuously locate the object in real time.
Patent on Augmented Reality filed by Apple with the US Patent Office.
To do this, Apple uses something called 'Reverse sliding window filter (SWF) ", whose objective is to minimize the computational load through the use of predictive codes that map the orientation of each object in relation to the device. Thus, initially the system could load the positional information based on the location of the device saving a multitude of resources.
It is still early for Apple to fully develop this technology, although it is true that there are reports that the company is putting a lot of force in everything related to Augmented Reality. Those from Cupertino they are showing a lot of interest in companies that develop this field and in how this type of technology will be coupled to the existing market.
We look forward to the progress that will take place in the months to come.
