Sony Wins Patent for Unlocking Phone Using ‘Simulated Parallaxing’ 3D Screen

Sony landed a U.S. patent (10,083,288) Tuesday for a method of unlocking a smartphone using a “simulated parallaxing” 3D scene on the phone’s touch screen, Patent and Trademark Office records show. Many “authentication techniques that involve a lock screen” to control access to a phone’s “full functionality” can have their “drawbacks,” said the patent, which names David de Leon, former director-interaction at Sony Mobile Communication in Sweden, as its only inventor and is based on a March 2014 application. It’s easy to forget a PIN or password, and even modern “biometric” techniques for unlocking a phone aren’t infallible, it said. The method it describes provides for a “relatively fast and easy to remember unlocking action” that affords a “reasonable level of access security” by dragging a finger on the parallaxing 3D scene to reveal a hidden “predetermined target object,” it says. Manipulating the object through finger “gestures” can “satisfy the input requirements to unlock the electronic device if the revealing of the hidden object is accomplished by two or more distinct motions performed in a predetermined order,” it says. Sony didn’t comment Tuesday on plans to commercialize the invention.