What it is: Apple filed more patents for smart glass wearable computers.
Two years ago, Apple acquired an eye-tracking company called SensoMotoric Instruments. The company’s Eye Tracking Glasses were capable of recording a person’s natural gaze behavior in real-time and in real world situations with a sampling rate up to 120Hz. A YouTube video that has since been removed showed how an athlete could wear such smart glasses to evaluate their performance.
Now Apple has recently filed patents for cooling smart glasses by blowing air to cool the user’s head, making the smart glasses more comfortable to wear for long periods of time.
Perhaps one of the more interesting patent filings is eye tracking to monitor the distance between the lenses and the display assembly and the user’s eyes. This could detect the relative motion of the headset to the eyes to produce a more accurate visual experience when in motion. That’s likely where SensoMotoric Instrument’s eye-tracking technology is being used.
If you want to see the future of Apple, simply look at which companies they’ve acquired. When Apple acquired Metaio’s augmented reality technology, it was obvious they would eventually release augmented reality technology, which later appeared as ARKit.
While ARKit is limited to iOS devices, augmented reality is really suited for wearable smart glasses. Hence the future of ARKit is learning to develop apps for Apple’s smart glasses.
That requires learning the Swift programming language first, and ARKit second. When Apple releases smart glasses, they’ll likely expand ARKit’s capabilities to include eye-tracking. That means developers will soon be in demand to create smart glass apps as yet another spin-off from iOS like watchOS and tvOS.
If you want to profit from the future, you can’t go wrong learning to develop apps in ARKit.
To learn more about Apple’s smart glasses patents, click here.