Apple has filed a new patent that shows a potential feature on the iPhone that would let the owner see contents on the screen only through special glasses. If brought to reality, this new privacy feature would let concerned iPhone users hide what they are reading or watching from people around, for example, on a metro train.
Patently Apple has spotted the new Apple patent filed with the US Patent & Trademark Office earlier this week. It shows a diagram of how Apple wants to go to the next level to make sure the iPhone users have their privacy under their control. By the looks of it, the feature is appealing to me because, god knows how many times, I have tried hiding my WhatsApp chats, mails, and even movies on my iPhone screen when sitting inside a metro train.
Apple’s patent calls this feature “Privacy Eyewear” and defines it as a system that can display “vision-corrected graphical outputs and standard graphical outputs on an electronic device.” Only the person who wears the special glasses will be able to see the screen content of the paired iPhone. These glasses could be the ones that Apple is rumoured to be working on besides its own mixed-reality headset.
The exact specifics of the “Privacy Eyewear” are not available right now, but the patent says the feature would let users “interact with the calibration graphic to intentionally blur the graphical output presented on the display of the device (iPhone).” This only means that the content could be changed so that it appears blurred to anyone who is not using the special glasses to see it.
This technology sounds very futuristic to me at this point in time, and if it arrives in, say, two to three years from now, it may try to inculcate new behaviour of using phones. For instance, you could check messages, notifications, and watch movies using glasses, but then, holding the phone in front of you would be a little weird. And since we are talking about censoring screen content for people around you, they would end up watching you gazing at either a blank screen or some deformed content. But since smart glasses and headsets are what will drive the next phase of phone technology, a technology like this could very well arrive just so people feel more confident about their privacy.
Apple’s new patent also shows it could have plans to map additional features of an iPhone user’s face through the Face ID biometric. The patent reveals a new system that will be able to distinguish between people on the basis of their hairstyles, beard, mustache, glasses, no glasses, reading glasses, sunglasses, among other things.
For now, these are just patents and they do not necessarily come to reality. And even if they do, companies take a long time developing them for the masses. But so much as the possibility of a technology like this is exciting.
