Videoconferencing on the iPhone

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Video conferencing on the iPhone rumors have been around almost as long as the iPhone itself.  Well, they are still in rumor mode but have a very slightly more realistic chance at coming to fruition if Apple's latest patent unearthing gets the go-ahead.  Informationweek (via Apple Core) found a bunch of information relating to video conferencing on the iPhone.  Quoth the patent:

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.
....
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.

Is this something we'll see in iPhone 3.0?  Although patents are rarely a good indication of upcoming products, this one is an interesting read.

 

Comments (4)

They gotta do it, this company ACN, Donald Trump endorsed, is doing big things with their video phone. They got the iSight on the Laptops, and the Display, cmon Apple iPhone Video do it upppp

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 territory
specifically 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....

(Plus, that info was out the day the patent became publicly known on the Apple blogging, forum scene...)

The iPhone is a great phone. We all know that. I just hope they don't drop the ball and make this happen sooner than later along with cut and paste! Let's keep our fingers crossed!