Apple gets patent for ‘Ambilight’ for head-mounted display

Apple has been granted a patent for a head-mounted display technology. The patent describes a method to reduce ‘eye strain’ by also illuminating the area around the display.

The relevant patent, with number 8,212,859 and entitled ‘Peripheral treatment for head-mounted displays’, was requested in October 2006 and awarded this week. According to the description, current hmd glasses, especially the opaque models, have the problem that it looks like you are looking at the display through a tunnel due to the fact that the field of view of the eye is larger than the viewing angle offered by the hmd . This ‘tunnel vision’ causes eye fatigue, among other things.

Apple wants to counter this so-called ‘eye strain’ by also illuminating the area around the display in HMD glasses. As with the Ambilight backlighting that Philips uses on many of its TV models, Apple is proposing a system where the color of the edge lighting can be matched to the displayed content of the mini display. The lighting can take place in different ways.

The patent mainly focuses on HMD systems where the displays are not translucent. This is in contrast to the Google Glasses-ar glasses from the company of the same name and a similar one solution by Lumus, in which an image is projected into an optical, transparent element via internal reflections.