Apple presses on with headset that's an iPhone on your face

AppleInsider

Picture safety goggles where instead of glass, you slide an iPhone over your eyes. That was Apple's first idea for the Apple Vision Pro and it will not let it go.

Detail from the patent showing an iPhone being slotted into a headset

After the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, Apple admitted almost conspiratorially that for years it had filed hundreds of headset patents in plain sight. But there's one it keeps coming back to, and it was originally about the earliest, while it now also looks like the cheapest.

All the way back in 2010, Apple applied for a patent called "Head-Mounted Display Apparatus for Retaining a Portable Electronic Device with Display." It was then granted the patent in 2015.

But it didn't stop then. In 2020, it filed a new application for a patent with the same name -- and didn't stop there either.

For now a patent with the same name has newly been granted. And the text of it refers to being filed in 2023 as a continuation of one previously submitted in 2022.

Someone at Apple is really keen on this patent -- and it's increasingly hard to fathom why. For each version of the patent is about exactly the same idea of mounting an iPhone in front of a user's eyes.

Once the iPhone is slotted into the headset, users would have a separate remote control for both

The various patents describe ways "that allow users to couple and decouple a portable electronic device" such as the iPhone illustrated in each filing. This "temporarily integrates the separate devices [the iPhone and headset mounting] into a single unit."

"The portable electronic may be physically coupled to the head- mounted device such that the portable electronic device can be worn on the user's head," continues the latest version. "Each device may be allowed to extend its features and/or services to the other device for the purpose of enhancing, increasing and/or eliminating redundant functions between the head-mounted device and the portable electronic device."

In other words, once you've popped the iPhone onto your nose, it should stop being a phone and start being a headset.

Regardless of how carefully-worded the various patents are, this still sounds like a View Master. It sounds like a toy.

But maybe it was always supposed to. The proposals about what a device could show might perhaps apply equally to today's Apple Vision Pro as to 2010's gimmick.

Certainly this is a stretch, but perhaps this was how Apple started hiding all of those Apple Vision Pro patents in plain sight.

Yet that wouldn't explain the rather dogged way that Apple has been applying for a patent on this -- and twice succeeding.



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DAalseth

Price, practicality, and usefulness. NGL, I’m more interested in something like this than the AVP. 

mpantone

We have seen this before. The Google Cardboard-compatible Mattel View-Master VR Viewer in 2015:

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/mattel-view-master-virtual-reality-viewer-starter-pack

But Apple's version will be $499 and weigh 2 kilograms. The optional headstrap will be $49.

Of course, the View-Master unit had a number of shortcomings. The biggest was the fact that the it wasn't compatible with a wide variety of smartphone dimensions. The optics were fixed so were limited to a subset of viewers' eyes. There was no headstrap. Audio was terrible because it relied on the phone's built-in speakers.

Of course the View-Master headset lenses were crap but at $18 for the whole shebang, what can one expect? Also, it was just a mechanical smartphone holder, there were no electrical connections to the handset itself.

Some of these have been addressed by modern technologies (widespread adoption of wireless earbuds takes care of audio shortcomings).

But Apple should continue to file patents. Maybe something will work. As most of here know, most patents never see daylight as a shipping product/service.

shamino

Yep.  I built a Google Cardboard (this model no longer sold, but I paid $6 for it in 2021) device for my iPhone.  It works great (as great as you can expect for $6) and is conceptually not very different from this patent application.

Yes, the Apple patent is more than just a mounting bracket and lens system, but ultimately, it's just holding a phone in front of your face in order to provide a VR interface.  The rest is just window dressing.

Marvin

mpantone said:

Of course, the View-Master unit had a number of shortcomings. The biggest was the fact that the it wasn't compatible with a wide variety of smartphone dimensions. The optics were fixed so were limited to a subset of viewers' eyes. There was no headstrap. Audio was terrible because it relied on the phone's built-in speakers. 

There was a Gear VR for $100 too:



An Apple designed one would fix a lot of the issues.

This would be like a $599 iPhone 14 + $100 case = $699. The resolution here would be bad at less than 1K per eye.

But if the total retail price of these parts comes to $699 and 2K Micro-OLED displays are $300 for a pair, they have enough parts to make an affordable, very lightweight, reasonable quality headset that retails around $1199. Even adding additional tracking like hand/eye tracking, it would be under $1500.

It wouldn't be as sharp as Vision Pro but would give mostly the same experience and would build a platform with a bigger user-base in the millions, which is needed to be sustainable. The display spec can be increased later.