Car Without Windows
You might have seen this circulating around the interwebs and thought it was a silly joke written by a satirical news site. I’m afraid it isn’t. Apple did indeed file a patent describing a window-less autonomous car that replaces glass with cameras.
The company notes in its patent that “autonomous vehicles may have limited or even no windows, and thus the motions that passengers experience in such vehicles may not match what they are visually seeing, potentially causing motion sickness.”
To solve this issue, Apple would use a VR system that could “match virtual views that match visual cues with the physical motions that a passenger experiences.” The company claims windows are inherently unsafe and believes a VR system would not only be safer but allow for smaller, cheaper cars that felt larger on the inside.
I’d bet my internal combustion engine car that we won’t be driving in a window-less Apple vehicle anytime soon. However, this patent did at least spawn the already overused but still chuckle-inducing “Apple hates Windows” joke. So…there’s that.
