Apple may have canceled plans for an Apple Car, but it’s still being granted patents related to automobiles. The latest (number US 11935197 B2) is for “Adaptive Vehicle Augmented Reality Display Using Stereographic Imagery.”
About the patent
In the patent Apple says that real-time augmented reality faces a variety of challenges when it’s a primary display technology in a vehicle traveling at various speeds and angles through ever changing environments. Weather conditions, sunlight, and vehicle kinematics, are just a few of the elements that may impact the rendering but that also limit a system’s overall capabilities.
This is especially true since on-board sensors have a fixed range and often require algorithms for optimizing queries which impact overall quality and response time. Apple apparently thinks it can improve AR features on vehicles — although the question is, “What company will benefit from this technology — or is Apple still developing features if it decides to revive the Apple Car in the future?”
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “An AR system that leverages a pre-generated 3D model of the world to improve rendering of 3D graphics content for AR views of a scene, for example an AR view of the world in front of a moving vehicle. By leveraging the pre-generated 3D model, the AR system may use a variety of techniques to enhance the rendering capabilities of the system.
“The AR system may obtain pre-generated 3D data (e.g., 3D tiles) from a remote source (e.g., cloud-based storage), and may use this pre-generated 3D data (e.g., a combination of 3D mesh, textures, and other geometry information) to augment local data (e.g., a point cloud of data collected by vehicle sensors) to determine much more information about a scene, including information about occluded or distant regions of the scene, than is available from the local data.”
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