Patent details showing iPhone plugged into headset
Imagine safety goggles that slide your iPhone over your eyes instead of glass. This was Apple’s first idea for Apple Vision Pro, and they’re not letting it go.
After the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, Apple almost conspiratorially admitted that it had openly filed hundreds of headset patents over the years. But there’s one that keeps coming back, and while it was originally the fastest, it now also seems to be the cheapest.
Back in 2010, Apple filed a patent called “Head-Mounted Display Apparatus for Holding a Portable Electronic Device with a Display.” After that, we obtained a patent in 2015.
But it didn’t stop. In 2020, the company filed a new patent with the same name, but that’s not all.
A new patent with the same name has now been obtained. And the text mentions that it will be submitted in 2023 as a continuation of what was previously submitted in 2022.
Someone at Apple is working hard on this patent, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand why. Each version of this patent is more or less the idea of attaching an iPhone to the user’s eyes.
Plugging the iPhone into the headset allows users to control both remotes independently.
The various patents describe methods to “enable users to combine and uncouple portable electronic devices,” such as the iPhone, as described in each application. This will “temporarily unite separate devices” [the iPhone and headset mounting] combine into a single unit. ”
The latest version continues, “The portable electronic device can be physically coupled to a head-mounted device so that the portable electronic device can be worn on the user’s head.” “Each device shall be permitted to extend its functionality and/or services to other devices for the purpose of enhancing, increasing, and/or eliminating redundant functionality between head-mounted devices and portable electronic devices. There is.”
In other words, when you put your iPhone on your nose, it should stop being a phone and start functioning as a headset.
Regardless of how carefully worded the various patents are, this still sounds like View Master. It sounds like a toy.
But perhaps it should have always been done that way. The suggestions about what the device can display may perhaps apply just as well to today’s Apple Vision Pro as they did to the 2010 gimmick.
Granted, this is an exaggeration, but maybe this is how Apple started hiding all of its Apple Vision Pro patents in plain sight.
But that doesn’t explain why Apple has been quite persistent in filing patents on this, and has been successful twice.
