While smartphone manufacturers keep their life cycle with yearly launches, there’s a lot of things happening in the background. Every year, these companies release smartphones that are packed with the best of technology they can offer. However, they’re still trying a lot of new products behind the scenes. These products rarely are visible to the public, thankfully, patent filings are there to show us what these OEMs are experimenting behind closed doors. The latest bit comes directly from Xiaomi. The company filed a patent at CNIPA (Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration) which shows us that there’s no limit for pop-up cameras.
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The images above are design sketches extracted directly from the patents. They reveal three distinct varieties of the design starting with two dual-camera setups on the front and back. It goes all the way to a dual setup on the front and a five sensor array on the back. That’s correct! Xiaomi may be experimenting with smartphones with up to 7 cameras in a single pop-up camera mechanism. The generous amount of camera sensors are occupying most of the space above the screen. As a result, we have a really wide pop-up array.
Of course, we suggest you to not hold your breath for this “hepta-camera” array. After all, patents don’t always make it to the production phase. However, it’s really interesting to see that Xiaomi is always trying to innovate the design of its smartphones. Moreover, we believe that it would be really interesting to see how the Chinese giant can fit that many sensors in a narrow enclosure. Last, but not least, it’s interesting to see that companies are also interested in making the rear camera arrays invisible to the eyes.
