The Apple Vision Pro may interact with a wireless base station

Apple has been granted a patent (number US 11727619 B2) for a “video pipeline” that shows the upcoming Vision Pro may interact with a “base station”

The US$3,499 (and up) “Spatial Computer” was announced at June’s Worldwide Developer Conference. However, it won’t be available until early 2024 — and, then, apparently only in limited quantities.

About the patent

Conventional VR (virtual reality) and MR (mixed reality) systems are typically either tethered systems including a base station that performs at least some of the rendering of content for display and a device connected to the base station via a physical connection (i.e., a data communications cable), or stand-alone devices that perform rendering of content locally. Apple says that stand-alone systems allow users freedom of movement; however, because of restraints including size, weight, batteries, and heat, stand-alone devices are generally limited in terms of computing power and thus limited in the quality of content that can be rendered. 

Base stations of tethered systems may provide more computing power and thus higher quality rendering than stand-alone devices. However, Apple says the physical cable tethers the device to the base station and thus constrains the movements of the user. 

The company wants a base station for the Vision Pro to be wireless, not wired. I’d think that a Mac or iPad could serve as such a base station.

Summary of the patent

Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “A mixed reality system that includes a device and a base station that communicate via a wireless connection The device may include sensors that collect information about the user’s environment and about the user. The information collected by the sensors may be transmitted to the base station via the wireless connection. 

“The base station renders frames or slices based at least in part on the sensor information received from the device, encodes the frames or slices, and transmits the compressed frames or slices to the device for decoding and display. The base station may provide more computing power than conventional stand-alone systems, and the wireless connection does not tether the device to the base station as in conventional tethered systems. The system may implement methods and apparatus to maintain a target frame rate through the wireless link and to minimize latency in frame rendering, transmittal, and display.”

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