14 DAY TRIAL // After the IBM partnership, Apple is looking to gather more experience in Businesses. Their first foray on that market seems to be an invention related to Video Conferences. It is, however, not an app, but a hardware device related to that topic.
According to patentlyapple, the US Patent and Trademark Office has published 33 newly-granted patents for Apple Inc. The one we're taking apart now includes a multi-view camera system that employs scalable video encoding.
With a new partnership like the IBM one, such a device would be easy to promote in the enterprise environment. Apple makes the case of the video quality in the video conferences systems, which is generally low. They believe that the quality issues relate to the large amount of bandwidth that a good enough resolution video requires.
Also, Apple thinks that another issue is the awkward positioning of the video cameras. Some configurations have only one or two cameras that can "see" the whole conference location. The result is a low-quality video for each participant. In order to increase the resolution, the cameras are being moved when a participant needs to talk and then moved away to another one.
There is already a solution for that problem – the Round Table conferencing device by Microsoft. They describe the device as one that sits in the middle of a conference table and provides a 360-degree view of the conference location. Unfortunately, the transport of high-quality video content from one location to another is very bandwidth-intensive.
The need to provide higher-quality video content for active speakers and little need to provide higher-quality video for the other non-active participants has pushed Apple to create a new system. The patent they have been granted covers a scalable video coding in a multi-view camera system suited specifically to video conferencing.
Apple doesn't want its device to be a push-to-talk one, but to analyze the audio content originating from different image areas and automatically selecting the image associated with the most dominant speech activity. The encoded video stream along with an audio stream for the selected audio content is encapsulated into an appropriate transport stream, such as a Real-Time Transport Protocol, and delivered to a conference bridge or another conference location.