When the Body Becomes the Interface: 10 Meta Patents

What is it?

"Reverse pass-through glasses" describes an AR/VR device that reconstructs the portion of the user's face hidden by the headset and presents it on outward-facing displays. FIGS. 1A and 1B show the headset itself and the view presented to a forward onlooker.

A conventional VR headset hides the eyes and much of the expression as soon as it is worn. This proposal captures the missing face, reconstructs it computationally and presents a perspective-corrected three-dimensional view to people outside the headset.

What is it?

"Haptic actuators and related wearable devices" describes thin haptic actuators integrated into wearable forms such as gloves. FIG. 3 combines the glove, a fingertip cross-section and a detailed view of the actuator itself.

Tracking a hand in VR tells the system where the fingers are, but a virtual object does not physically stop them. By returning force to selected parts of the fingertips or palm, the glove can create a tactile boundary for something that exists only in the virtual scene.

What is it?

This patent describes a wrist-wearable device with multiple sensors arranged around the wrist to sense electrical signals associated with hand and finger movement. FIG. 1 presents the sensor pods as an annular band around the wrist.

Camera-based tracking can lose fingers when they are occluded or leave the field of view. EMG instead measures the electrical activity associated with producing the movement, including signals that can be present before the motion is visually obvious.

What is it?

"Tracking facial expressions using ultrasound and millimeter waves" places transducers around a headset to illuminate portions of the face with acoustic or radio-frequency signals. FIG. 2 shows the sensing arrangement around the wearer's face.

Cameras can track expressions, but line of sight may be blocked by facial hair, headset structures or occlusion. This approach treats changes in distance and reflected waves as another way to recover the movement of the face.

What is it?

"Predicting lower body movement for avatars" addresses the part of the body that head-mounted cameras often cannot observe well. FIG. 4 shows different user postures and the lower-body configurations inferred for them.

Signals can include headset height, visible knees or feet, inertial sensors and other cues. A trained model then estimates a physically plausible lower-body posture and merges it with the tracked upper body.

What is it?

"Physical keyboard tracking" uses headset imagery to identify a physical keyboard and estimate its pose so a virtual model can be registered at the same location. FIG. 7 illustrates the relationship between the real keyboard and its virtual representation.

Productivity in VR leaves one awkward physical object behind: the keyboard under the user's hands. Instead of replacing it with a purely virtual keyboard, this invention lets the digital environment adapt to the familiar real tool.

What is it?

"Partial Passthrough in Virtual Reality" proposes revealing only the parts of reality that matter at a particular moment. FIG. 6 shows a halo of passthrough imagery around the user's hand, with a nearby real coffee cup visible inside the virtual environment.

Removing the headset or switching the entire view to video every time the user reaches for an object breaks immersion. Partial passthrough instead opens a localized window around the hand when interaction with the physical world is needed.

What is it?

"Varifocal display with actuated reflectors" describes a head-mounted system that changes the focus state of its optics. FIG. 4 links the HMD, varifocal block, focus prediction, eye tracking and rendering system.

In ordinary stereoscopic VR, the eyes may converge on a virtual object that appears near or far while accommodation still focuses on a display at a fixed physical distance. The invention attempts to reduce that conflict by changing the optics as the viewed depth changes.

What is it?

"Gesture-based control system" uses one or more cameras to recover the three-dimensional pose of a user's hands and interpret gestures as computer input. FIG. 4 shows a standing user interacting while cameras above the display observe the hands.

Earlier motion interfaces often relied on instrumented gloves or markers. This approach instead tries to reconstruct the fingers from images so the user's ordinary hand becomes the controller.

What is it?

"In-ear electrodes for AR/VR applications and devices" places electrodes and microphones in an in-ear fixture and connects the sensing system to an augmented-reality headset. FIG. 1 presents an architecture in which the in-ear monitor contributes to assessing the user's health.

The disclosure discusses brain activity through EEG, cardiac activity through ECG and eye-related signals such as EOG. An earbud-like form factor becomes not only an audio device but also a stable contact point for physiological sensing.