From Patent to Present: Exploring Apple Vision Pro’s 2007 Patent
By Ashley Kim
On June 5th 2023, Apple announced to the world the new “era of spatial computing” on YouTube. Interested users could pre-order on January 19th 2024 or wait until Apple Vision Pro became available for in-store and online U.S. purchase on February 2nd 2024. The 3D vision tech has spurred curiosity and dystopian fervor on social media with many making connections to the speculative fiction show, Black Mirror.
Putting these initial reactions aside, people have dug up perhaps a more thought-provoking revelation: Apple Vision Pro has roots in a patent that dates all the way back to 2007– the year the first iPhone debuted. This means Apple’s aspiration for a 3D immersive experience even predates the launch of the Oculus headset or other popular VR hardware. A central reason for this delay in the Vision Pro’s development is that Apple invented 50% of the headset’s technology themselves and frame their product as a more sophisticated, head-mounted display over a VR headset1.
Apple was finally granted this 17-year old patent on August 22nd 2023 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office2. Examining this time capsule, one can immediately see the similarities between the illustrations and the present product (as well as it being funny to see the discontinued iPod being used as its power source). The patent’s description refers to the Vision Pro as a “personal display device” and centers more on creating immersive experiences for entertainment. It hopes of users feeling like they are actually inside movie theaters or sport stadiums. It relates sophisticated details on the device responding to head, eye, and hand movements which the Vision Pro’s have actually impressively achieved3.
It is exciting to wonder what else is in store for the future of Apple products based on their patents if “the most ambitious product Apple has ever created” was in the works 17 years ago4. For one, Titan, the code name for Apple’s electric car project, has been rumored to be in the works since 2015, as suggested in this Wall Street Journal article from 9 years ago. It has had more recent speculations of its possible release in 20285. In combination with the Apple Vision Pro, though, Apple was granted a patent on October 18th 2023 for windowless, self-driving cars to utilize Vision Pros to see outside the vehicle6... Whether or not we’ll see this patent come to fruition can only be determined by time.
On its U.S. launch day, Apple CEO Tim Cook celebrated Apple Vision Pro as “tomorrow’s technology today”7. In a similar spirit, patents offer a glimpse into the technology of tomorrow– no matter how unconventional or seemingly far-fetched– in the present day.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX9qSaGXFyg
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-vision-pro-available-in-the-us-on-february-2/
3https://9to5mac.com/2023/08/23/working-on-vision-pro-since-2007/
4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX9qSaGXFyg
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-titan-car-project-to-challenge-tesla-1423868072
5https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/23/bloomberg-apple-car-2028-release/
6https://9to5mac.com/2023/10/18/apple-car-with-no-windows
7https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/02/apples-vision-pro-headset-launches-in-us.html
Palworld or “Pokémon with Guns"?
By Kyle Wyatt
Questions of plagiarism have surrounded the release of a recent video game, Palworld. Since its release in late January, the game has amassed over two million concurrent players and has become the second-highest-played game of all time on Steam, one of the largest digital software distributors in the market. A big reason behind Palworld’s popularity is its striking similarities to the Pokémon franchise. Palworld is structured as an open-world monster-taming survival game where players capture “Pals” with the help of “Pal Spheres,” where Pals are tamed and used in future combat. This formula appears to be almost identical to what has made Pokemon a global phenomenon, except for a few tweaks.
Palworld takes the mechanics, character proportions, and art style of Pokémon and adds the unexpected. Pals can carry rifles, rocket launchers, and miniguns while being put to work in the player's world. Another feature of the game is industrialization, where players can have Pals work in assembly lines to create goods and fully experience the joys of capitalism.
The primary area of potential copyright infringement is the world of Pals' design interface within the game. Many of the creatures appear noticeably similar to Pokemon, with some creature models having almost perfect proportions as if they were traced by the development team. Multiple threads on social media platforms have popped up discussing the similarities, with users comparing two characters and noting very little difference.
While the designs are very similar, it’s up to Nintendo whether they want to pursue legal action. It would be an uphill battle to find enough substantial similarities that would win in court. If a Pal’s design was so clearly similar to a copyrighted Pokemon’s design that an ordinary observer wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, the former would be a derivative work and would infringe upon that copyright. Finding that smoking gun would be difficult, and even then it might not be worthwhile for Nintendo to file a lawsuit.
A clear example of plagiarism can be found in Limbo of the Lost, a 2007 point-and-click adventure game for the PC. The game contained nearly identical backgrounds to places in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Diablo II, and a dozen other games. After only a few months following its release, the game was taken off shelves to avoid lawsuits. In this case, there was no possibility of claiming mere inspiration, as essentially everything was just copied from one game to another.
In the 2012 case of Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., the copyright holders of the Tetris game sued a mobile game studio that drew heavy inspiration from the original game. The mobile app developers initially tried to avoid infringing by adding new audio and gameplay mechanics. The judge ruled in favor of Tetris, stating that in a side-by-side comparison of the two games, if someone had to “squint to find distinctions only at a granular level, then the works are likely to be substantially similar” and there would be infringement.
Palworld is ultimately a parody, whether the developers are ready to admit it or not. It takes the idea of Pokemon and twists it into an amalgamation that’s both intriguing and shocking. That’s the reason why it has been so successful, and why so many people have flocked to buy a copy. After years of monotonous and boring Pokemon game releases, fans have wanted something new. Palworld successfully capitalizes on this desire.
Images courtesy of Google Images.