“The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 33 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple, “[including] an invention that relates to an advanced video conferencing system that includes a multi-view camera system that employs scalable video encoding.”
“Apple’s surprising video conferencing system is to compete with Microsoft’s Round Table Conferencing device and it’s a system that Apple might be able to get IBM to promote in the enterprise,” Purcher reports. “[Apple’s patent language explains], ‘There is a need to provide higher quality video content for the active speaker and little need to provide higher quality video for the other non-active participants. Accordingly, there is a need for a video conferencing technique that is capable of providing higher quality video content for the active speaker while providing lower quality video content for the other non-active participants in a given conference location in a bandwidth efficient and effective manner.'”
“Apple’s granted patent employs scalable video coding (SVC) in a multi-view camera system which is particularly suited for video conferencing,” Purcher reports. “Multiple cameras are oriented to capture video content of different image areas and generate corresponding original video streams that provide video content of the image areas.”
Read more, and see more of Apple’s patent application illustrations and diagrams, in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Sarah” and “Arline M.” for the heads up.]