[The Atlantic Wire]
… Regardless of what happens next week, Apple’s been working on 3D screens for years. While the company likely started thinking about how to do 3D way back in the 80s, when Apple emerged as the leading computers for image-manipulation. But the patent applications for 3D technology have only really started flowing in the past three years.
The most recent 3D-related patent that Apple was awarded basically turns your computer screen into a room that you can play around in. However, in an separate application filed on February 9, the company described new technology as a “three dimensional user interface effects on a display by using properties of motion.” In other words, it’s a screen that produces 3D images without glasses. How, you might ask? It tracks your eyeball movement. “Once this continuous frame of reference is known, the position of a user’s eyes may either be inferred or calculated directly by using a device’s front-facing camera,” the patent application reads. “With the position of the user’s eyes and a continuous 3D frame-of-reference for the display, more realistic virtual 3D depictions of the objects on the device’s display may be created and interacted with by the user.” (See Figure 8 to the right or check out the full application in PDF format here.) An iPhone is used in the patent application, but an iPad is just one big iPhone. We wrote about some more Apple 3D patents last year, if you’re interested in reading more.
This month’s application comes in addition to 14 other patents Apple was awarded a couple of weeks before Steve Jobs’s death in November. Among them are a couple of mobile 3D screen-related inventions, one of which Patently Apple described as “a patent for Motion Plane Correction for MEMs-Based Input Devices — which utilizes a form of nanotechnology.” In plain English, the blog says that “the invention could equally be used in context with a remote or game pad.” …
See the full post here: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/02/were-dreaming-3d-ipad/49290/