New technology dreamed up by Apple would allow users to control an interface by simply striking a pose. This would work by having Apple devices generate a depth map for identifying “a head and at least one arm of the humanoid form” from any image in which one appears.
A way to switch on our next Apple TV by waving a hand or turning your head toward the screen? Yes please!
Apple was previously granted a patent designed to recognize hand-based gestures (throwing up a pair of devil horns to open iTunes, for instance).
The latest patent, which was published today, goes further, since it allows for entire upper-body poses.
Incredibly, this is the seventh 3-D mapping patent Apple has received in 2015. These relate to PrimeSense, the Israel-based company behind the original Xbox Kinect. (Apple acquired the company back in 2013.)
More than 18 months on, we still don’t know what Apple plans to do with PrimeSense’s full-body, motion-tracking technology, but at the rate it keeps filing tracking-related patents, you’d have to expect something will happen soon.
Either that or Apple paid a reported $360 million just to troll its rivals!
Source: USPTO
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
