Apple wants to make it easier to start a FaceTime video while you’re already in a voice phone call. The company has been granted a patent for “Establishing a Video Conference During a Phone Call.”
About the patent
In the patent Apple notes that many of today’s portable devices, such as smartphones, provide video capture functionality. A user of the portable device can capture both still images and video through a camera on the phone.
However, to transmit captured video to another party, the user must generally either send the video directly to the other party or upload the video to another location (e.g., an Internet video hosting site) after the video is done being captured. Unfortunately, this does not allow the other party to view the live video stream as it is captured by the portable device.
In addition, Apple notes that standard portable devices are only equipped with one camera, and processing information from this one camera is difficult enough. An ideal device would have multiple cameras and could send out live video that is a composition of video from at least two cameras.
Apple says this is an “especially difficult problem in light of the limited resources available for portable devices, both in terms of the device processing multiple captured video streams and a network to which the device is connected handling the transmission of the live video streams.”
Apple’s idea is to provide mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad with two cameras that can take pictures and videos. The display screen would display the captured picture images and video images. The device includes a storage for storing the captured images for later transmission to another device.
The device further has a network interface that allows it to transmit the captured images to one or more devices during a real-time communication session between the users of the devices. The device also includes an encoder that it can use to encode the captured images for local storage or for transmission to another device. Finally, the mobile device sports a decoder that allows the device to decode images captured by another device during a real-time communication session or to decode images stored locally.
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “Some embodiments provide a method for initiating a video conference using a first mobile device. The method presents, during an audio call through a wireless communication network with a second device, a selectable user-interface (UI) item on the first mobile device for switching from the audio call to the video conference.
“The method receives a selection of the selectable UI item. The method initiates the video conference without terminating the audio call. The method terminates the audio call before allowing the first and second devices to present audio and video data exchanged through the video conference.”
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