Roblox

The sole VR & AR patent describes a system that reads head movement from a mobile device's camera and translates it into corresponding avatar motion within a virtual environment. Rather than relying on a single data source, the approach combines device orientation readings with head orientation derived from facial landmark detection, applying both simultaneously to update where the avatar faces and how the background perspective shifts. A configurable parameter controls what proportion of detected head movement actually carries over to the avatar, which keeps the motion feeling responsive without overcorrecting for small or incidental shifts.

Roblox's 2 Platforms patents tackle distinct but complementary challenges around how users interact with and report on virtual environments. One covers a timeline navigation system that treats a persistent virtual world more like a scrubbable media file, letting users move to any point in the world's history and have the full scene reconstructed by replaying stored event sequences rather than simply loading a static snapshot. The other addresses in-experience moderation by automating the process of identifying which avatars are actually visible to a user at any given moment, using ray-casting from avatar bounding boxes to the virtual camera's near-clip plane to make that determination, then generating selectable overlays over a captured 3D scene so that reporting can happen quickly and with preserved visual evidence.