U.S. Patent No. 9543364 entitled "Electronic Device With An Open Screen", awarded by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, covers a method by which small holes are drilled in the screen of the device while human The naked eye is hard to discern so engineers can design a phone or tablet for true edge-to-edge or full screen displays.
Until now, the aesthetic design of smartphones has been defined and limited by their main function, the front screen, which is dominated by the iPhone's traditional candy bar design with the screen in the front and middle with all the other supporting hardware in place .
For example, the iPhone is equipped with a central screen and sensors and physical buttons are placed on the forehead and chin.Special components such as front camera, light sensor and distance sensor can be hidden in a quick cover glass Or unite in the inactive portion of the screen.Other buttons such as the handset and the home button need to be accessible to the user without hindrance and especially the Touch ID means that these components cut out some of the space on the front panel.
As smartphones are becoming more compact, there has been an impetus to trying to hide basic components beneath the active (or light-emitting) area of the screen.However, as with most high-tech ideas, implementing such a system It is easy to get together.
Apple recommends in its patent that sensors and other devices be mounted underneath a series of openings or through-holes in the active part of the OLED panel.These openings may be left blank or, if desired, glass, polymer, Or other materials.
Locating the sensor directly in line with the openings described above facilitates the collection of light, radio waves, acoustic signals, etc. Microphones, cameras, antennas, light sensors, and other devices will have unobstructed access through the display layer despite the appearance of obstructions .
The formation of an opening between the pixels indicates that self-illuminated display technologies such as OLEDs outperform traditional LCD structures that require backlights and filter layers.According to the application, the aperture groups can be arranged in a variety of shapes and can be larger or smaller than the underlying components For example, the opening for the camera may be circular and only as large as the objective, while the sensor modules are orders of magnitude larger.
Or it could be that the opening itself has a varying shape and size, allowing the auxiliary display to be installed.
Interestingly, Apple mentioned that this patented technology can be used for built-in head-up display systems.In some embodiments, a window is created by providing one or more transparent areas in the front and back of the device, in which a transparent OLED Monitor. As the user's line of sight crosses these windows, they see the digital image that covers the real world.
If the future of the iPhone, the window-based HUD HUD can be Apple's first implementation of augmented reality applications.Apple did not mention the specific mechanism, but the system can theoretically surpass the augmented reality and mixed reality.
For example, a back camera may collect scene information and then use the local or cloud-based computer vision assets to process the scene information A digital image containing useful information about the user may then be projected onto a real-world object aligned with the sub-display.
It is unclear whether Apple will adopt the technology on future iPhones, though it is said that Apple will release a full-screen, special-edition smartphone later this year.As for Apple's patent HUD, It is said that Apple is actively preparing to kill AR market in the next one to two years, but not by virtue of a separate device.
Article from: MACX