Future Apple Vision Pros may have automatic illumination features for lighting up a dark environment. Apple has applied for a patent for a “System For Automatic Illumination of a Wearable Device.”
About the patent filing
The patent filing involves techniques and systems for monitoring a physical environment and triggering illumination in eyewear in response to the context in the physical environment. In it, apple notes that certain activities can be difficult if performed in a particular environment. For example, watching screens in a dark room, reading in the dark, and the like may be problematic for a person trying to perform these activities.
What’s more, simply turning on an overhead light may be an undesirable solution. For example, other people in the environment may be bothered by the light. Further, an overhead light may be too bright for user activity. Accordingly, improvements are needed for intelligent illumination.
Apple’s solution? A Vision Pro that could include illuminators activated “intelligently” based on characteristics of the surrounding environment, such as ambient light determined by sensor data collected by an ambient light sensor. In some embodiments, the spatial computer may include illuminators which, when activated, illuminate the surrounding environment using light in a first spectrum which may not be visible to a user, such as infrared light.
An image may be captured of the environment while the illuminators are activated. The device may determine, based on the image data, a region of interest in the environment. The device may then activate one or more additional illuminators in a visible light spectrum toward the region of interest such that the region of interest becomes visible, or increases in visibility, to the user.
For example, the device may include a see-through display through which the real environment is visible to the user as-is. That is, in contrast to a pass-through display in which a camera feed of the environment is captured and presented to the user as image data, the see-through display allows the user to view the actual physical environment through the see-through display. By illuminating the region of interest in the environment, the physical components of the environment become more visible to the user’s eye.
Summary of the patent filing
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent filing: “Intelligently illuminating an environment includes receiving, at a head mounted device, information indicative of ambient lighting conditions in the environment. In accordance with a determination that the ambient lighting conditions do not satisfy a brightness criterion, one or more first illuminators on the head mounted device are activated to project light in a first spectrum. While the one or more first illuminators are activated, image data of the environment is captured. A region of interest is determined in the environment based on the captured image data, and a second one or more illuminators are activated to project light in a visible light spectrum different than the first spectrum.”
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