I'm going to do a lot of referencing on this one simply because I have too many links to provide and they pretty much get the point accoss.
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/02/iphone_patent_p.html
Alexander Wolfe post in the link above his beliefs that this video-conferencing capability could possibly see light in the next version iPhone rumored by many to be announced to the world in June of this year.
"Here's a reference to video conferencing, buried amid a laundry list of features."
"In some embodiments, the functions may include telephoning, video conferencing, e-mailing, instant messaging, blogging, digital photographing, digital videoing, Web browsing, digital music playing, and/or digital video playing. Instructions for performing these functions may be included in a computer-readable storage medium or other computer program product configured for execution by one or more processors."
"But wait; it gets even better. Apple has given some thought to camera angles. (Must be the Pixar influence.) At first I thought this was Apple answering the common complaint that users have trouble taking their own pictures, because the camera is on the back of the phone. I quickly realized that Apple probably doesn't care about that. What it does care about is that, for video conferencing to work, you need a forward-facing lens. Thus there's this in the patent:"
"In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the back of the device, opposite the touch screen display on the front of the device, so that the touch screen display may be used as a viewfinder for either still and/or video image acquisition. In some embodiments, an optical sensor is located on the front of the device so that the user's image may be obtained for videoconferencing while the user views the other video conference participants on the touch screen display. In some embodiments, the position of the optical sensor can be changed by the user (e.g., by rotating the lens and the sensor in the device housing) so that a single optical sensor may be used along with the touch screen display for both video conferencing and still and/or video image acquisition."
"OK, so there you have it, proof in the patent that Apple's thought through what it needs to do to make the iPhone video-recording and –conferencing capable. I believe we will see these features in the third-generation iPhone."
Sounds good to me! Of course we've heard all of this buzz before for several months before the iPhone 3G was announced with article after article, leaked photos and definitive speculation from many. So I'm gonna play it safe this time and stand by "I'll believe it when I see it."
More links in relation: http://www.9to5mac.com/iphone-viseo-conference
Quoted from the link above:
"Mon, 02/02/2009 - 10:24 — Tom (not verified)
The article missed a fair bit out.
Other pointers:
- Previous hirings talking about CMOS. They seem to go over the camera territory, into video recording territoryspecifically auto-white balance, auto- exposure. These are areas were Pure Digital had to do a fair bit of work on for the Flip for example.
- Upcoming PowerVR GPU chip video conferencing capabilities
- The capabilities of some carriers to actually already do 1 way video, 2 way audio
- Previous patents
- lack of non-video iChat. Seemingly waiting for video?
- Biggest one potentially? iLife? Video stablisation? Cmon! geo tagging, face recognition? Heck, that's a hop and a skip jump away from taking frames *within* a video, and doing the same. auto-tagging video, recognising faces? Doable, but computaionally intensive...."
I'm sure if Apple could make this shine they could possibly double their iPhone sells of last year. Of course with the millions more that would surely jump on board you can bet that the network would bog down to a.....well, crippling crawl.
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