Apple engineers are constantly involved in the development of technologies that have the role of revolutionizing the way we use iDevices and a recent invention patent granted it promises to be extremely interesting. The patent describes a technology that would allow users to use iDevice cameras to focus on multiple points of an image. Basically, when your camera displays an image on the screen, the camera software could focus on several elements within that image, something impossible to do in smart phones available on the market today.
A camera includes a lens arranged to focus an image on an image sensor and a touch sensitive visual display for freely selecting two or more regions of interest on a live preview image by touch input. An image processor is coupled to the image sensor and the touch sensitive visual display. The image processor displays the live preview image according to the image focused on the image sensor by the lens. The image processor further receives the selection of the regions of interest and controls acquisition of the image from the image sensor based on the characteristics of the image in regions that correspond to at least two of the regions of interest on the live preview image. The image processor may optimize sharpness and/or exposure of the image in at least two of the regions of interest. The image processor may track movement of the selected regions of interest.
Apple's technology also involves the implementation of a special processor that would take care of focusing the images recorded by the camera, so we are talking about the introduction of a new component in iDevices. The whole technology is extremely, extremely interesting and I think that a lot of people would be more than amazed to see it implemented in a smart mobile phone, and Apple would have a new marketing topic. It is not known when or if we will see this technology in any iPhone released in the near future, but I for one hope that Apple quickly finds a method to implement it.
