Were you fascinated by Iron Man’s last gift for Peter Parker - a mixed reality smart glasses and wished to wear one someday? Only problem is that your eyesight are not perfect and VR/AR headsets are useless for you? Maybe the world has decided to grant you this wish. And no, it is not a fake Chinese gimmick toy! 

In June 2020, Apple Inc filed two new patents for head-mounted or digital eyewear tech. The summary for the first patent is for “Optical Systems with Multi-Layer Holographic Combiners”. The Summary of patent talk about an electronic device that, “may include a display module that generates image light and an optical system that redirects the light towards an eye box. The optical system may have first hologram structures that replicate the light over multiple output angles onto second hologram structures. The second hologram structures may focus the replicated light onto the eye box. If desired, the device may include an image sensor. The first and second hologram structures may include transmission and/or reflection holograms. The optical system may redirect a first portion of the light to the eye box and a second portion of the light to the sensor. The sensor may generate image data based on the second portion of the light. The control circuitry may compensate for distortions in the first portion of the light by performing feedback adjustments to the display module based on distortions in the image data.”

The Second patent is for “Head-Mounted Display Device With Vision Correction”. The abstract of the patent explains it as “A head-mounted display may include a display system and an optical system in a housing. The display system may have displays that produce images. Positioners may be used to move the displays relative to the eye positions of a user’s eyes. An adjustable optical system may include tunable lenses such as tunable cylindrical liquid crystal lenses. The displays may be viewed through the lenses when the user’s eyes are at the eye positions. A sensor may be incorporated into the head-mounted display to measure refractive errors in the user’s eyes. The sensor may include waveguides and volume holograms, and a camera for gathering light that has reflected from the retinas of the user’s eyes. Viewing comfort may be enhanced by adjusting display positions relative to the eye positions and/or by adjusting lens settings based on the content being presented on the display and/or measured refractive errors.” 

What does it even mean?

Simply put, Apple has gained a patent for head-mounted display with vision correction. This head-mounted display (HMD) device with a vision correction system that eliminates the need for users to wear prescription glasses to enjoy mixed reality (MR) content. 

This automatic system adjusts the optics to address the user’s’ vision problems such as nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism. As a result, the system can eliminate the need to wear glasses while using Apple’s HMD.

Why it is so significant? 

The Vision Council of America claims that approximately 75% of adults use some sort of vision correction. Also, the global eyewear market size was valued at $ 138.7 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.1% from 2020 to 2027.

This is the utility factor but the cool factor is here: Apple note mentions that: “a user playing a video game may be in a confined space and close to surrounding objects. To allow the user's eyes to relax during the operations of (block 116 not shown), a distant mountain scene may be inserted into the video game, thereby avoiding the need to interrupt the user with a text message ("relax eyes") or other content that might disrupt the user's enjoyment of the video game.”

Here is the list of Inventors:

1. Graham Myhre, PhD; Senior Engineering Manager of Display Exploration; Myhre previously worked at Lytro Inc that developed next-gen Light Field optics and micro-optics.

2. Elijah Kleeman: Lead Software Engineer, Manager of mobile software team

3. Christina Gambacorta: Vision Scientist

4. Jonny (Hyungryul) Choi: Engineering Manager; Investigates new display and optical technologies for future Apple products.

5. Nan Zhu: Senior Optical Engineer

6. Brandon Clarke: Senior Display Engineer, part of the Panel Process and Optics (PPO) Engineering Group

7. Phil Hobson: Senior Product Design Engineer

8. Ed Valko: Camera Hardware and Systems Prototyping Manager

9. Qiong Huang:  Hardware Engineer; previously worked at Osram Sylvania as an Optical Engineer

10. Branko Petljanski: Engineering Manager, Incubation (Cameras)

11. Paul Johnson: Lead (Genius)

Congratulations to the team! 

We are curious to get a hold on this real-life EDITH glasses. What do you think?