New Sony patents that were originally spotted by Android Headlines and recently shared by the World Intellectual Property Organization seems to spills the beans on the Japanese tech giant’s secret strategy about 3D camera sensors and AR-compatible applications.
If the listings are anything to go by, Sony’s big plans involve multi-dimensional 3D scanning using pose metrics, determining the scale of an object from a 3D scan and verifying environmental conditions for 3D scanning.
The first new patents allude to a system that is probably embedded in a smartphone’s 3D sensor camera and comes in handy while checking the surrounding environment of the user or objects in a bid to ensure 3D scanning is attainable.
Particularly, it adopts the device-bound sensor to carry out several checks for lighting and a slew of other environmental conditions which are likely to crop up due to background objects against a list of norms either in the cloud or locally. It doesn’t have to do that in real time, thanks to the system’s ability to work from a sequence of photographs.
The company’s second filing builds on the earlier presumption by enforcing a series of instructions in the device that houses the camera in order to figure out how processing will take place based on the adjustment of the device.
This will enable the system that has been described in the third patent to proceed to the step of generating the 3D image data linked either with the person or object in question. It is worth noting that Sony has patented a resolution for finding a more ideal scale and dimensions of the scanned object by using a ‘plurality’ of photos as well as the ratio between various points in those objects.
Although the patents may be linked, the question is how they might be used. It looks like the new patents can be efficiently joined in multiple combinations in order to serve various use cases. For instance, the second Sony patent can be effectively used in combination with the environmental checking system as well as the capture system. This carries out a solution that ensures that the user is an ideal environment for 3D modeling.
It can be recalled that Sony had alluded to 3D camera sensors as the current generation’s counterpart as far as innovation is concerned. Keeping in line with that, it is hardly surprising that the company is leaving no stone unturned in a bid to ensure its associated patents come to fruition.
While it may seem that the aforesaid associated patents may not be ready to use in their existing form, Sony recently decided to increase the production of related LIDAR-based time-of-flight sensors, ignoring a decline in overall demand.
It still remains to be seen whether or not the new patents will be used and exactly how does the company plan to utilize them, but we could actually end up seeing those in some smartphones, given that ToF sensors and 3D cameras are likely to take the industry by storm in the near future. For more images of the new Sony patents, you can head straight to Android Headlines.
(Source: 1)
