Amazon’s Augmented Reality Living Room Ambitions

As if a talking Amazon Echo was not enough in the living room, Amazon is now pushing to make its consumers’ living rooms change from being digitally connected to becoming a virtual reality.

The company received two patents on a technology that one might think of being something straight out of a science fiction movie — except it might soon make for a reality in which users could project a “digital world” into their rooms and use their bodies or headsets to navigate through virtual reality, Bloomberg reported.

The first patent (“reflector-based depth mapping of a scene” — shown on left) would essentially use a computer projector to transform the surroundings into a virtual setting that could respond to a user’s actions. This would be achieved by using a single light source, which also makes the technology cheap. A multiple light source technology currently exists but is deemed costly for its frequent recalibration requirements.

The technology of the second patent (“object tracking in a 3-dimensional environment”) would allow users to control devices with a mere hand gesture, which would be monitored by cameras that can track body movements and can translate that into commands, according to Bloomberg.

While these two patents might be thought of much like the many Apple patents — which can make the next generation iPhone appear to be straight out of the future — this R&D indicates Amazon’s plan to be not just something that shows up on a consumer’s doorstep but rather to find a permanent place and a new market in homes — much like the iPhone.

And Amazon seems to have already taken the first step in that direction with Amazon Echo, which has Siri-like functionality but packs a lot more power and complexity.