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A person uses an iPhone 12 Pro with a LiDAR scanner on it last October. Photo by Bloomberg.

TI Reality Check: The Common Ground Between an Apple Car and AR Device

By  |  April 8, 2021 11:10 AM PDT
Photo: A person uses an iPhone 12 Pro with a LiDAR scanner on it last October. Photo by Bloomberg.

What do two Apple projects—its autonomous vehicle and augmented reality technologies—have in common?

Seemingly not much, other than the intense secrecy surrounding both of them. But a new patent Apple won on Tuesday suggests at least one common technical ingredient between them. The U.S. patent describes an approach to computer vision that solves “a central problem in many applications, such as autonomous navigation, housekeeping robots, and augmented/virtual reality.”

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