Sony Patents a Depth Camera That Sharpens Its Focus on Nearby Objects Automatically
When a sensor fires a laser pulse and gets reflections back from two objects at once, most chips have to pick one…
1960 filings · category
Hardware patents
The Big Tech patents worth knowing in hardware, in plain English. Updated weekly from new USPTO publications.
Recent filings
1960 total
Sony Patents Technology That Maps a Person's Full Body Shape From a Camera
Sony is working on a system that takes the raw cloud of 3D dots a depth camera captures and automatically maps them…
Qualcomm Patents a Way to Render Different Parts of a Photo at Different Resolutions
Most phone cameras treat every pixel in a frame the same way. Qualcomm's new patent describes a chip-level trick that lets different…
Apple Patents a Predictive Cache System for Faster 3D Graphics Rendering
Every frame of a ray-traced 3D scene requires thousands of calculations about how light bounces off surfaces, and the speed of those…
Sony Patent Splits Shadow and True Color Data From Any Photograph
Every photo you've ever taken is a mix of two things: the actual color of an object and the shadows cast by…
Samsung Patents a Camera Chip Design That Stops Unwanted Light From Blurring Edges
Stray light sneaking in at the edges of an image sensor is one of the quieter reasons photos look washed out or…
Samsung Patents a Single Camera Light That Switches Between Scanning and Mapping Faces
Samsung has filed a patent for a camera illumination module that can flip electrically between two completely different lighting patterns for depth…
Sony Patents a Camera System That Reads Colors and Measures Distance Simultaneously
Sony has filed a patent for a camera system that uses two specialized color sensors with overlapping light bands to calculate depth…
Intel Patent Explores EVs Charging and Discharging Based on Grid Energy Demand
Intel has filed a patent for a system that tells electric vehicles when to charge, when to push power back to the…
Sony Patents a Fix That Keeps Video Quality Settings From Going Haywire
A small numerical drift inside a video encoder can corrupt image quality, and Sony has patented a method to stop it before…
Samsung Patents a Phone That Slides Open to Reveal a Bigger Screen
Samsung is working on a phone where the screen physically slides out to become larger, and the device's protective trim pieces are…
Samsung Patents a Galaxy Ring Feature That Shows Battery Life via PPG Sensor Blinks
Smart rings have no screens, which raises a genuinely awkward question: how do you check the battery? Samsung's answer is to steal…
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