Apple wants your Mac to be able to automatically align with an external display as evidenced by a new patent filing for “Automatic Display Alignment Using Feature Tracking.”
About the patent filing
It relates generally to workstations, and more particularly to aligning multiple displays of a workstation. Users often use more than one computer display to expand the screen space of their workstation for various applications. Typically, an external display is added to the workstation as a stand-alone display or a built-in display of another device, such as a notebook computer or tablet computer.
Existing alignment solutions require the user to manually inform the operating system of the relative positions of the displays. For example, macOS provides a settings option that allows the user to manually arrange display icons representing the displays.
To arrange the displays, you drag the display icons to a desired relative position to each other in a settings pane. For example, the user may drag the icon for an external display to the right side of the icon for a desktop computer display.
However, Apple says that, although tech savvy users may know how to use this settings option, other folks may not. This can result in a significant number of calls to the developer’s support service by users requesting help on how to set up an external display. Apple wants to overcome such a problem.
Summary of the patent filing
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent filing: “Embodiments are disclosed for automatic display alignment using feature tracking. In some embodiments, a method comprises: capturing, with a first camera of a first display, a first image; capturing, with a second camera of a second display, a second image, where the respective fields of view for the first camera and the second camera are at least partially overlapped; transforming the first head pose into a first reference frame for the first display; transforming the second head pose into a second reference frame for the second display; generating a dual-display environment for the first and second displays based on the first and second head poses in the first and second reference frames, respectively; presenting a first portion of the dual-display environment on the first display; and presenting a second portion of the dual-display environment on the second display.”
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