Apple files patent application for longer iPhone battery life, Natal-esque head tracking
God bless the patent office
First things first: the battery life on an iPod touch or an iPhone is pitiful. Thanks to a patent filed this week, we know that Apple is working on improving it via the fairly unenthralling means of an "intelligent power management method".
Essentially, what this means is that future iDevices may warn their owners when they don’t have enough juice to get to the end of a film and invite them to tweak various settings to make the remaining juice go further.
And now the interesting bit. We already know about head tracking thanks to Microsoft’s Project Natal, which was demonstrated at E3 this year. It looks like Apple is seeking to take its devices into the same flashy space.
"Using the detected position of the user, the electronic device may use any suitable approach to transform the perspective of three-dimensional objects displayed on the display," Apple’s application reads, before switching to a language ostensibly like English but about as comprehensible to your average Englishman as Urdu.
"For example, the electronic device may use a parallax transform by which three-dimensional objects displayed on the screen may be modified to give the user the impression of viewing the object from a different perspective."
What this boils down to is that your iPhone or iPod touch will be able to watch what you’re doing and change what’s on the screen in such a way that it looks like the screen is actually a window to another place, containing objects that reflect the light shining in from your world and swing out of view if you move your head too far to the left.
Still confused? Here’s a demonstration of the technology in action, courtesy of one of its pioneers Johnny Chung Lee [via AppleInsider]
