Last week was all about Samsung and its cool flexible device patents, but today Apple enters the scene with some patents of its own. They refer to designs and pico projectors integrated into MacBooks and iDevices. The US Patent and Trademark Office published a series of 40 new patents granted to Apple recently.
Some of them refer to electronic devices with projected displays, that may communicate with other gadgets in the same workspace. The concept here is to integrate mini or pico projectors into future iOS devices and also introduce a special accessory of this kind for MacBooks. Back in June 2009 Apple offered hints about such projector systems for iOS devices, while in March 2010 they came out with a patent application for projection systems.
The patents are very detailed, so it’s clear that Apple put a lot of thought into this and that they’re going to implement it soon. There will also be some gesture sensing systems, that will interpret shadow and silhouette gesturing in a darkened environment. Seeing how Apple recently became interested in buying the maker of the first Kinect system, it all becomes interesting suddenly…
