New patent shows Apple plans to make Apple Glass comfortable and immersive

        Apple's AR devices, such as "Apple Glasses," may have cooling features to keep the wearer comfortable and make subtle adjustments to the AR/VR environment so that it looks natural. From Steve Jobs' insistence that Macs must have rounded corners instead of rectangular dialog boxes, Apple is known for its attention to detail. This time, two new patents illustrate this painstaking effort, one of which involves sweat and heat dissipation.

　　“Feedback coordination for virtual interactions,” the first of two newly granted patents, focuses on things you don’t realize in real life but notice if an AR or VR environment goes awry. When you go to a concert with a friend, the sound you two hear will be subtly different simply because of where you’re sitting. The same thing happens when you stand up or walk past someone’s knees on your way out. The music sounds different depending on where you’re standing.

　　Apple said in the patent: "The music processing system preferably strives to improve the temporal precision of the music performance to improve the music quality and user experience. This task is called quantization and may involve presenting different playbacks of the sound at different times and locations. Apple wants the audio to change slightly when you hear it, depending on where you are. The solution proposed by Apple is to focus on the audio itself, as well as the physical location of the wearer. The patent not only describes detecting the location of the headset wearer to change the sound, but even includes when to provide the sound to the wearer.

　　The second patent published today focuses on how to keep the wearer cool. Apple stated in the patent that in known systems, such as wearable head displays, display panels are typically supported by carriers, frames, or other such structures, which are typically formed of lightweight materials (such as plastic) to reduce the overall weight of the system. However, these structures provide little benefit in terms of thermal regulation and often lead to irreparable damage or system failure without proper cooling and heat dissipation.

　　Apple pointed out that existing systems typically add additional components, such as heat sinks, to achieve heat dissipation, but these components also cause wearer comfort issues and increase the overall weight of the system. Apple's solution is to provide a display system that integrates thermal solutions into structural components, which not only reduces the overall number of components, complexity and weight of the display system, but also increases thermal conductivity and improves thermal management, thereby reducing operating temperatures and extending the useful life of the system.

　　It's not that Apple has any particularly new methods of dissipating or reducing heat, the company aims to take advantage of hardware that already has to exist. That hardware includes the display panel plus a carrier that supports the first side of the display panel. This carrier, or frame, is a thermal solution that facilitates the transfer of heat away from the display panel. There's further content to include a heat sink that does its job but doesn't adversely affect the wearer. There are also solutions that mean components move in order to create airflow to dissipate heat.