Apple Files Patent To Use Your Display As Camera Flash

In an interesting patent application, Apple has plans to use your display’s brightness as camera flash. This is one of those simple yet absurd ideas.

When you initiate the camera application,  an ambient light sensor will calibrate the environment you are in. Based on this, the display will be configured to act as flash. The various parameters of the monitor that will be configured are:

• color
• intensity
• brightness
• duration

The patent application details the flow of events and the various parameters:

The patent filing is of January this year and currently focuses on glorified PC use-case scenarios. iPhone, front facing camera and the screen acting as flash? Oh boy!

Not a lot to detail about the patent. To put it in a nutshell: Bright display, not so great ambient lights around, the camera triggers the display to certain lighting levels depending on the surrounding environment’s lighting.

Update: @Abhinaba pointed out that Photo Booth uses this tech.