Why Apple Will Turn to Holograms By Ben Kunz on August 07, 2012 Businessweek
Look around your office hallway or college campus and you'll see people holding interactive panes of glass. Smartphones and tablets, so revolutionary a few years ago, are quickly becoming commodities. Apple (AAPL) is now locked in a fierce patent battle with Samsung over tablet designs-a sure sign that, whoever is right, touchscreens are converging into gadgets that look like everything else. So as Apple prepares to launch its next iPhone in September, with a slightly bigger screen, here is a prediction-Apple devices will soon project holograms like you've never seen. This is not mere speculation, but insight based on Apple's patents, recent acquisitions, and the business imperative to do something to break free of the tablet clutter. In November 2010, Apple patented a three-dimensional display system that would "mimic a hologram" without requiring special glasses. The patent narrative is fascinating, noting that one current market gap in screen technology is the ability of a device to project stereoscopic 3D images to multiple viewers at the same time. Apple proposed an elegant solution: match a forward-facing camera/sensor that tracks the location of different viewers' eyes, similar to how Microsoft's (MSFT) Kinect monitors body movements or new digital cameras recognize human faces, with a screen that can send out beams of light at different angles. Voilà! Each eye of each viewer receives a different angle of the image, and suddenly Princess Leia would appear to beam out of R2-D2 and float in the air. ... http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-07/why-apple-will-turn-to-holograms _______________________________________________ Please be sure to include a URL to the article. Reply to the sender with a "Thank you" if you like this post. _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
