Amazon Just Patented a Living Room Holodeck

Just strap a projector to your ceiling and you're good to go.

Augmented reality tech like Microsoft's Hololens and the upcoming Magic Leap are undeniably cool, but they do have a downside. You have to wear some chunky thing on your face to use them. That's a problem it looks like Amazon might be out to solve. The web-commerce giant just patented two different technologies that could help bring holograms to the living room with out the cumbersome specs.

The first, a patent for "object tracking in a 3-dimensional environment," is all about being able to track movement in a room. Unlike Microsoft's Kinect, which sits atop a TV and just looks forward, the system Amazon outlines would be able to track the movement of a user's hands throughout an entire room with as little as one ceiling mounted node. Meanwhile, a patent for a "reflector-based depth mapping of a scene," pairs a single ceiling-mounted projector with a depth-sensing camera that sits on a table. When all is said and done, the two would theoretically pair to create glasses-free holograms you could control with your hands while sitting on the couch.

This is just a couple of patents, so there's no guarantee that Amazon would follow through on the tech, but it does align with some of the experiments the Everything Store has tried in the past.The (god-awful) Fire Phone was big into motion-tracking with its absurd suite of six front-facing cameras. Meanwhile, the Amazon Echo voice-control-tube-thing is all about tablet-top tech that brings the internet seamlessly into your living room the same way this crazy hologram system might.

It's likely to be years before holograms are actually showing up in your living room (if they ever do at all), but cutting the bulky headsets out of the equation definitely makes it a cooler prospect.

Source: USPTO via Bloomberg

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