US 2,016,026,253 · Filed 2015-06-13

Magic Leap's Blueprint for Mixing Digital Objects Into Your Real World

Magic Leap figured out how to let your headset understand the real room around you by snapping photos and mapping out all the surfaces and objects nearby. Then it can layer digital stuff on top—like a virtual monster sitting on your actual couch—so the digital and real worlds blend together seamlessly.

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The plain-English version

What it protects

The patent covers a system that captures images through a head-mounted camera, analyzes those images to extract spatial reference points (called map points), and then separates those points into sparse and dense categories before normalizing them. What's protected here is the specific method for processing real-world visual data so that a computer can understand the 3D structure of a space and position virtual objects accurately within it.

Why it matters

This is foundational augmented reality technology. By protecting a method to map physical spaces and anchor digital content to them in real time, Magic Leap locked down a core capability that any AR headset needs to function convincingly. Without this kind of spatial understanding, virtual objects would float randomly or feel disconnected from your actual surroundings, breaking the illusion.

Real-world use

When you put on an AR headset and see a virtual character standing on your kitchen table that appears to be actually sitting there, the device is using this patented process to understand where your table is and how to position the character so it looks real.

Original USPTO abstract

Configurations are disclosed for presenting virtual reality and augmented reality experiences to users. The system may comprise an image capturing device to capture one or more images, the one or more images corresponding to a field of the view of a user of a head-mounted augmented reality device, and a processor communicatively coupled to the image capturing device to extract a set of map points from the set of images, to identify a set of sparse points and a set of dense points from the extracted set of map points, and to perform a normalization on the set of map points.

Patent details

Publication number: US 2,016,026,253
Filing date: 2015-06-13
Grant date: Application — not yet granted
Assignee: Magic Leap, Inc.
Inventor(s): BRADSKI GARY R., MILLER SAMUEL A., ABOVITZ RONY
CPC class: G06F3/017

View original record on Google Patents →

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