If not being able to use the touchscreen while talking over the phone seems like an inconvenience, Sony may soon have just the model for you. The design revealed in one of its most recent patent filings sports a segmented case with a bottom bar that can tilt into a perpendicular angle from the main screen to become a full featured heads-up display equipped with gesture and voice recognition.
Developers will have a field day if and when the concept moves into production. The filing details how the right software could enable the extendable display to pull up information about the topic of a call when you need clarification and create a summary of the conversation afterwards for future reference.
And those are just the applications that Sony thought to include in the patent request. Where it gets really interesting is when start making use of the two cameras that the company plans to put on the bottom where the two displays diverge (not shown above) to capture a three-dimensional view of.your immediate field of vision.
Sony sees that functionality coming useful for quickly sharing pictures and videos with the person on the other end of the call, such as from a flight information display at an airport ahead of your departure. And when you’re closer apart, like, say, within walking distance, the extensible display could be used to layer navigation instructions over the view with a couple of quick gestures in front of the cameras.
As a culmination of not only the pros but also the cons of both wearables and traditional mobile devices, the model may not appeal to the taste of every consumer. But Sony’s hybrid could serve as a valuable stop-gap until smart glasses like its own experimental model become a viable mass market option in their own right.