U.S. Patent No. 10,154,254 B2 (‘254), issued on December 11, 2018, for “Time-of-Flight Depth Sensing for Eye Tracking.” The inventor is Nicholas Daniel Trail of Bothell, Washington. The applicant and assignee is Facebook, Inc., of Menlo Park, California, the omniprescient social media company. The ‘254 specification discloses a headgear for a virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) gaming system. The headgear contains an eye-tracking system to provide for a more optimal VR/AR experience. The ‘254 claims are directed to the apparatus comprising the electronic display, optical system, light source, image processing device, and controller, and the method of eye-tracking for use in the apparatus.
Figure 3 illustrates the eye-tracking system of this invention:
The Cooperative Patent Classification is H04N (pictorial communication, namely, stereoscopic video systems, or multi-view video systems for tracking with gaze detection, i.e., detecting lines of sight of viewer’s eyes (13/383)); G06F (electric digital data processing, namely, input arrangements for transferring data to be processed into a form capable of being handled by a computer for eye tracking input arrangements (3/013)); G06K (recognition of data; presentation of data; record carriers, namely, methods or arrangements for reading or recognizing printed or written characters or for recognizing patterns, e.g., fingerprints for preprocessing and feature extraction (9/0061)).
The ‘254 patent is one of a family of patents covering the OCULUS® product, Facebook’s VR offering.
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