A new patent has surfaced that shows Apple has been working on a killer 3D imaging camera that will use depth detection sensors such as LIDAR, RADAR, and lasers. Yup, frickin lasers. The camera also includes facial gesturing recognition, just in case you can’t tell if someone is smiling or frowning before you pull the trigger on your photo.
From Jack Purcher over at Patently Apple:
The three-dimensional imaging apparatus may be used for recognizing facial gestures. Facial gestures may include, but are not limited to, smiling, grimacing, frowning, winking, and so on and so forth. In one embodiment, this may be accomplished by detecting the orientation of various facial muscles using surface geometry data, such as the mouth, eyes, nose, forehead, cheeks, and so on, and correlating the detected orientations with various gestures.
Two things are for certain: first, the fact that this patent is already publicly available probably means we’ll never see the camera in an iPhone; second, if the camera does get released, it won’t be long until we see thousands of YouTube remakes of Avatar.
The technology would make for an interesting way to automatically sort photos based on moods that have been detected by the gesturing recognition. iPhoto’s faces technology would get a whole lot more useful, that’s for sure.
Via: Patently Apple
