Apple’s video conferencing patent

Apple has been awarded a video conferencing patent for connecting multiple cameras in one location:

Multiple cameras are oriented to capture video content of different image areas and generate corresponding original video streams that provide video content of the image areas.

One part seems to overlap with the way Google Hangouts works:

An active one of the image areas may be identified at any time by analyzing the audio content originating from the different image areas and selecting the image area that is associated with the most dominant speech activity.

The illustrations are interesting – ranging from a TARDIS-like desk to a vertical video display (showing that the video feeds could be sent to devices people view in portrait mode).