An Apple patent unearths details about ambient noise sensors for future iOS devices which helps you enjoy your videos when your environment gets a little too noisy. Do you ever find yourself sitting on a train watching a movie on your iPod app and you hit tunnels that grow outrageously noisy? Or perhaps you’re out at the park during a lunch break and the construction work across the street gets pretty wild? Pretty soon, Apple will help alleviate that issue, somewhat, with ambient noise sensors.
The idea is that when your environment gets a little too loud while you’re watching videos on your device, volume is increased or subtitles or captions pop up so you don’t miss a thing. Sensors will be placed at unobtrusive locations around the phone or device, much like the ambient light sensors on the iPhone, to pick up on the relative volume in your environment. Having the subtitles is clearly not as good as hearing what’s going on, but it’s a decent compromise when you can’t just tell everyone and everything around you to shut up.
In the images included with the patent, there is an overlay shown on the screen and what menu options could potentially look like once sound starts to get out of control. Perhaps it’s a little obtrusive, but I’m pretty sure Apple will find a way to make it work on iOS (hopefully better than its pop-up notification system).
The technology also introduces the idea of sampling noises from a background in order to gauge how it handles noise in the future. It will sample some noise and make a judgment on how to adjust volume or whether subtitles should pop up, and then it acts accordingly. Some places are noisier than others, so the sound fingerprints or samples will be stored and matched up for future reference. Pretty nifty if you ask me, but I’m curious to see how it works in practice.
[Via: AppleInsider]