Apple Patent Fights Lookie-Loos With Glass-Activated Screen Blur (arstechnica.com) 24
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A patent filed by Apple and published Thursday by the US Patent and Trademark Office details the tech giant's interest in creating "privacy eyewear" that blurs content on a device's screen unless someone is wearing special glasses to look at it. As spotted by Patently Apple, the patent, which focuses on creating different FaceID profiles for various visual impairments, explores a new type of privacy screen. The patent doesn't specify any Apple product by name. Instead, it refers to electronic devices in general, including smartphones, watches, laptops, TVs, and car displays. Drawings in the patent show the feature working on a smartphone-like device. The technology would use a face scan to determine if the user is wearing the required glasses. It could recognize the headgear by a specific graphic, such as a QR or bar code.
If you're worried about someone looking at your phone over your shoulder, you could activate the feature "to make the graphical output illegible." Your privacy eyewear, meanwhile, would "counteract the intentional blur." "The blurred graphical output may compensate for the distortion created by the privacy eyewear vision of the user by, for example, blurring a portion and/or the entirety of a standard graphical output; generating an overlay over the standard graphical output; and/or making elements of the standard graphical output larger, brighter, and/or more distinct," Apple's patent reads. "In some embodiments, the blurred graphical output may only replace certain graphical elements presented in the standard graphical output. The blurred graphical output may be a default graphical output designed to compensate for the privacy eyewear." Further reading: Apple Aiming To Announce Mixed-Reality Headset In 'Next Several Months'
If you're worried about someone looking at your phone over your shoulder, you could activate the feature "to make the graphical output illegible." Your privacy eyewear, meanwhile, would "counteract the intentional blur." "The blurred graphical output may compensate for the distortion created by the privacy eyewear vision of the user by, for example, blurring a portion and/or the entirety of a standard graphical output; generating an overlay over the standard graphical output; and/or making elements of the standard graphical output larger, brighter, and/or more distinct," Apple's patent reads. "In some embodiments, the blurred graphical output may only replace certain graphical elements presented in the standard graphical output. The blurred graphical output may be a default graphical output designed to compensate for the privacy eyewear." Further reading: Apple Aiming To Announce Mixed-Reality Headset In 'Next Several Months'
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Yeah, this is Apple. They should have a pair of fashionable contact lenses for this
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Cleaning cloth and fluid is $50 extra. Refuses to work unless cleaned by an iWipe using iFluid cleaner. Cloth and cleaner are chipped.
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Wait so does this mean that Apple fans will all be wearing QR codes on their faces soon?
Well.... They got... You know... (Score:2)
Well.... They got... Do you know those 3D anaglyph images that have existed since... well, since there are two colors and a two-color glasses? Well, this is just the same principia but nicer.
Hey, I've invented the wheel with auto-locking-in-place. Where should I ask for a patent to start suing people?
Re: Well.... They got... You know... (Score:1)
Thatâ(TM)s what I was going to say, this patent is too obvious. You can have active glasses which synchronize filter patterns similar to those old spy kits you could mail order for 25c.
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X-Ray specs!
scratched lens (Score:4, Insightful)
I scratched the lens on my special glasses. Took it to the local repair shop and they put in a new lens. The aftermarket lens won't unblur by screen and now I have to send my glasses into Apple, where they want $27000 and 4 weeks to do the repair. Thanks, Apple.
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Just got my glasses back. Apple is the best. I verified that my new glasses were working, I could see the screen again. Then I was prompted to install the Panopticon update on my glasses. You'd think Apple would have shipped them back from repair with the latest firmware. I went to apply the Panopticon update and the glasses bricked. They wont turn on, wont unblur the screen, nothing, zip, nada. Apple tells me that its $27000 and 4 weeks to repair, I can ship them in at my own expense. Thanks again, Appl
I'm pretty sure I saw something like this (Score:2)
Oh, yeah, the first episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex.
I already have this (Score:4, Funny)
What about the obvious low-tech solution? (Score:2)
What about a screen over-lay with some fine lines that narrow the field of view? If it doesn't interfere with the touch-screen, it could be made by a 3rd party as part of a case. If it does interfere, it would have to be built in which makes it less low-tech. If you're willing to go even further, it seems possible to have an adjustable mesh that could control the narrowing. I'm thinking along the lines of the same tech that makes LCDs and polarizing filters work.
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Reverse IPS
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If you want to do this (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL_HAmWQTgA
It shows you how to do this with a typical monitor screen.
The only difference that I'm seeing between this and reading Apple's patent is that the patent is also using FaceID as a part of the protection.
So, use FaceID to make sure that person looking at the screen is registered ("scanning at least a portion of a user's face using a sensor; generating a depth map using the scan... user may be authenticated as the registered user"), and then after the device is unlocked, you'd need the glasses in the YouTube video to see what's on the screen. ("method may further determine a corrective eyewear scenario, select a display profile that is associated with the corrective eyewear scenario").
Seems that the only difference to the YouTube video and Apples patent is that Apple copied Celal Goger's screen invisible patent, and just changed it enough to re-patent it (would explain the FaceID part).
Celal Goger invisible screen tech: https://www.gizhub.com/man-makes-glasses-will-hide-phone-screen-everyone
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You can watch this YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It shows you how to do this with a typical monitor screen.
The only difference that I'm seeing between this and reading Apple's patent is that the patent is also using FaceID as a part of the protection.
So, use FaceID to make sure that person looking at the screen is registered ("scanning at least a portion of a user's face using a sensor; generating a depth map using the scan... user may be authenticated as the registered user"), and then after the device is unlocked, you'd need the glasses in the YouTube video to see what's on the screen. ("method may further determine a corrective eyewear scenario, select a display profile that is associated with the corrective eyewear scenario").
Seems that the only difference to the YouTube video and Apples patent is that Apple copied Celal Goger's screen invisible patent, and just changed it enough to re-patent it (would explain the FaceID part).
Celal Goger invisible screen tech: https://www.gizhub.com/man-mak... [gizhub.com]
Did you read the Patent?
It is precisely the application of FaceID (and did you catch the bit about full multi-face support in FaceID being part of this?) that gives this some very interesting capabilities above and beyond simple viewer privacy screens.
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There's an even easier way to do it. You can buy a privacy screen protector that makes it impossible to see what is on screen when you are off axis.
Translation - pointless (Score:2)
" ... activate the feature "to make the graphical output illegible."
Translation: The display is "encrypted" until the camera reads a specific QR code.
I like the idea but it will take 5 seconds to photograph the 'password' on your glasses/headband and create a copy that anyone can use to read your display.
Patent requires impossible display technology. (Score:2)
The idea is that a near-sighted person can take off their glasses and the display will somehow produce an image that is in focus anyway despite being too far away from the person. The whole patent is about how you detect what glasses the user is wearing, which is sort of trivial if you have a phone with a face-ID sensor.
The hard part is making a display that appears to be somewhere else than its physical position. You could achieve that effect by placing a large (Fresnel) lens in front of the screen, but th
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-1, offtopic
The patent application includes no such claim.
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The patent only describes the trivial part: detecting whether the user is wearing glasses.
"2. The method of claim 1, wherein: the corrective eyewear scenario corresponds to the registered user wearing a corrective eyewear; and the graphical output compensates for a vision deficiency associated with the corrective eyewear scenario and the registered user."
It does not explain at all how the graphical output is supposed to do this correction. I tried to explain that it is essentially impossible.
Glasses pair with display? (Score:2)
I presume that each display would be blurred in a manner synchronized to the glasses. Otherwise if the guy beside me has the same glasses, the privacy is removed.