Barry Fox unearthed a patent application from Apple that has amazing implications:
We could soon see a new kind of display screen from computer maker Apple – one that simultaneously takes pictures while showing images.
The clever idea is to insert thousands of microscopic image sensors in-between the liquid crystal display cells in the screen. Each sensor captures its own small image, but software stitches these together to create a single, larger picture.
A large LCD screen filled with image sensors would be ideal for videoconferencing, Apple suggests, as participants would always appear to look straight into the “camera”. The technique could also add a camera function to a cellphone or PDA without wasting space, and light from the screen should help illuminate a subject.
The more sensors there are, the wider and clearer the image. Sketches accompanying the company’s patent show as many sensors as liquid crystal cells in a screen. If some of the sensors have different focal lengths, switching between them would make the screen behave like a zoom lens.
Read the full patent, here.
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Sounds as if they are a loooong way from anything realizable—but having been granted the patent, the clock is ticking to use it to advantage. BTW that’s not the full patent—you have to pay to see more that the abstract, claims, and description.
Although the claims are broad, and the level of interspersal of the sensor elements not limited to a one-to-one correspondence with the display pixels, keep in mind that an LCD-pixel-sized “image” sensor is not itself sensing an image—the wavelength of light and the associated minimum dimensions of the sensing cell preclude that—but rather is producing a signal based on what net amount of light impinges on it for a given interval. In this sense the ensemble of such sensors can produce an associated ensemble of signals, which if then appropriately processed could reproduce an image. Such single-signal-sensor arrays resemble a fly’s eye, and the wonderful ancient sci-fi-horror movie (and I presume the remake that I didn’t see) notwithstanding, the fly at best does not see an array or mosaic of little images, instead just a not-very-good resolution image at best.
The practical problems of such integration of sensors and existing LCD or other display technologies are formidable. What might be a little more practical: a mapping of optical fibers into the display interstices, so that the image sensing could be done at a remove from the noisy immediate environment of the screen. Ooops! There’s another patent.
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