Privacy Preserving Component Replacements in Artificial Reality
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Solution Overview
Problem
Artificial reality systems face challenges in maintaining user privacy when sharing real-world environments, as existing technologies provide too detailed representations of private spaces, and existing messaging methods consume high bandwidth with raw video and audio data.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a scene privacy manager to replace private real-world objects with generic components in user scenes, and converting audio and sensor data into pose data for avatar messages, allowing for low-bandwidth, privacy-preserving interactions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If raw audio and image data are sent for avatar messages, then communication quality is improved, but bandwidth consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the essential pose data from the full video stream, separating the useful information (spatial positioning and orientation data) from the redundant visual details. This allows the recipient to reconstruct the avatar's appearance and movements without transmitting the complete video data, significantly reducing bandwidth requirements while maintaining communication effectiveness.
Solution Approach 2:
Instead of transmitting the original video data, the system creates a simplified representation (pose data) that captures the essential movements and positions. This copy contains only the necessary information for avatar animation, eliminating the need to transmit unnecessary visual data while preserving the communicative intent.
2Adaptability or versatility
If detailed user scene data is exposed to third-party applications, then application functionality is improved, but user privacy is compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The scene data is segmented into two distinct categories: public components that can be shared with applications and private components that must be obscured. The system processes each component differently based on its privacy status, allowing functional information to be exposed while protecting sensitive personal details about the user's environment.
Solution Approach 2:
A scene privacy manager acts as an intermediary between the detailed scene data and third-party applications. This mediator filters and processes the scene components, replacing private objects with generic placeholders while preserving public spatial information, thus enabling application functionality without direct access to sensitive user data.
Data Source
AI summary
In some implementations, the disclosed systems and methods can replace components descriptive of private real-world objects with generic components that obscure details of the private real-world objects, such as the objects' structure and semantic information. In some implementations, the disclosed systems and methods can convert image and/or sensor data into pose data that can be used by a recipient device to animate an avatar of the sender while the audio stream is being played.