Apple’s 3-D mapping tech would turn your iMac into an Xbox Kinect

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Mouse, what mouse?
Photo: USPTO/Apple

New technology dreamed up by Apple would allow users to control an interface by simply striking a pose. This would work by having Apple devices generate a depth map for identifying “a head and at least one arm of the humanoid form” from any image in which one appears.

A way to switch on our next Apple TV by waving a hand or turning your head toward the screen? Yes please!

Screen Shot 2015-06-02 at 12.55.02
How Apple’s latest mapping patent would work.

Apple was previously granted a patent designed to recognize hand-based gestures (throwing up a pair of devil horns to open iTunes, for instance).

The latest patent, which was published today, goes further, since it allows for entire upper-body poses.

Incredibly, this is the seventh 3-D mapping patent Apple has received in 2015. These relate to PrimeSense, the Israel-based company behind the original Xbox Kinect. (Apple acquired the company back in 2013.)

More than 18 months on, we still don’t know what Apple plans to do with PrimeSense’s full-body, motion-tracking technology, but at the rate it keeps filing tracking-related patents, you’d have to expect something will happen soon.

Either that or Apple paid a reported $360 million just to troll its rivals!

Source: USPTO

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