It's another week in quarantine, and with all of the VR patents I've been reading over the last few months, it's almost enough to get me to pick one up and at least pretend I'm not still in my house. And big tech seems to be coming up with some zany things to keep me entertained in VR: I could wear shoes that allow me to walk for miles without leaving my room, become a high roller in VR gambling, and maybe even figure out how to not get motion sick wearing a headset.
And remember: The big tech companies file all kinds of crazy patents for things, and though most never amount to anything, some end up defining the future.
Alphabet
If you've ever had to take money out of an ATM at a bar, you've probably looked over your shoulders in both directions, huddled closely to the PIN pad and covered it while you typed, for fear that others might figure out your code. Apparently this is now something we need to consider in the world of VR. In a rather fantastic scenario that this Google patent outlines, some people are playing a card game in VR when one player, named Holly, chooses to show some of her VR notifications to everyone playing with her. Holly may have a bit of gambling problem, as she seems to be having to take out more cash for the game, and wants to keep her PIN private from the other players. But depending on how much she's taking out, they might not even need to snoop — they might be winning it away from her on the next hand.
There's so much talk about making gloves to help us better interact with virtual worlds, but what about our other appendages? Google seems to be thinking about how we move around in VR, patenting what seems to be a cross between 1950s roller skates and sensors to interact with VR computers. The idea aims to end one of the biggest problems keeping VR from being a truly immersive experience: Our rooms just aren't that big. Right now, while VR systems can track your movements, you're always limited to the space you're in — and walls and chairs still hurt. Google's patent would use motors and wheels (or treads) on the shoes, along with tracking devices that know where the room's walls are, to always ensure the wearer has space to move around in their virtual space. I can definitely see Moonwalk-like videos going massively viral.
Styluses are great ways of interacting with touchscreens, especially if you're any good at drawing (which is probably why I never use mine). But larger styluses that actually feel good to write with tend to be difficult to hide inside the device itself. Many companies now use magnets or pieces of fabric to attach styluses to tablets, but it's still very easy to lose them. Google's patent has a different approach: It outlines making a stylus that could fold flat, making it easier to stash inside another device. The user would then either unroll it or push it together — like plumping up a pillow — to use it. Sadly I don't think it would make me draw any better.
Amazon
How Alexa hears you before she's listening
The thing is, Alexa is listening to you all the time, even before you say its name. This patent outlines how Amazon's smart devices figure out what to process and what to ignore. Basically, the microphone is always listening and processing speech, and whenever the assistant thinks it hears its wake word, it sends a recording of whatever follows it up to the cloud for processing. It's how Alexa listens before it's listening, even though it's not really listening.
While Google is trying to make sure you can move around in VR, Amazon seems concerned with ensuring your VR world actually fits in your real one. This patent outlines a system for measuring the space of your room using the cameras on your smartphone, and uploading it to Amazon. This would allow any VR or AR experience to be sized for the room you're in — if Amazon were building a virtual mall for you to explore, you wouldn't accidentally walk into a wall while moving to try on some virtual outfits. And given we're all stuck at home, this seems like a great idea. I could use some new sweatpants.
How drones navigate the world
Amazon won three patents this week that shed a little light on how delivery drones might get to where they're going. First they use zoomable lenses to discern things at various distances — How far away is that tree line? How close am I to that building? — and then they use GPS to locate themselves in the world. And if that fails, they do pretty much the same thing humans have been doing forever when they're lost: Look for familiar landmarks to figure out where they are. They can also send that data to other drones to help them out if they're lost. Hopefully, unlike so many stubborn men, they won't be too proud to ask for directions.
Apple
Combating motion sickness with VR
I get terrible motion sickness in just about anything that moves. I even get it when I'm the one driving! I can't necessarily see how strapping a VR rig to my head while sitting in a moving vehicle would help me feel better, but apparently that's something Apple is looking into. The idea in the patent is to re-create scenes of the real world, moving along at the speed of the vehicle, to better acclimatize your confused body to what's going on. But given most VR systems — even the ones not running on the highest-powered computers out there — give me motion sickness themselves, this is definitely something I'm going to let others try first.
Tapping away on virtual keyboards on glass surfaces tends to get tiresome without any sort of physical feedback. Companies have tried to come up with ways around this for years, such as the (extremely annoying) audible taps as you type, or small vibrations as you hit each key. But Apple is apparently thinking of taking this a step further by creating a screen that could actually move as you type on it. Its patent outlines using small pieces of wire, attached to tiny motors below a flexible display, that could give someone the sensation that they're typing on something that actually moves, like a real keyboard. And now that the iPad has mouse support, who knows what sort of wonderful new input methods Apple will finally be open to?
Many Android devices over the years have had small colored LEDs that unobtrusively let their owners know when they had a notification, without any sounds or vibrations. Apple's phones have always shied away from this, but now it's at least exploring the idea for phones or wearables. This patent describes a ring of tiny lights that would sit around the device's main display that could either be used to alert the user to a notification, or even display simple messages themselves. I'm not sure whether I'd want my iPhone blinking at me, though I do sorely miss that Indiglo button on my old Timex watch. That might be fun to have on my $400 wrist computer.
Transcribing audio is time-consuming, and generally not fun. And if you've ever watched a TV with closed-captioning on, you'll know that doing it live is even worse. Facebook is working on making it better, winning a patent to transcribe snippets of voice notes that could be added to a user's profile page. The examples in the patent seem to suggest that there are humans out there who speak exactly the way they post on Facebook, which explains … a lot. Hopefully the transcription technology works better than the last time Mark Zuckerberg used something similar for a live speech.
Putting media companies out of work
There are some news outlets in the world that spend a lot of their time aggregating the work of other journalists. Think what you will of this practice, but it's a (meager) living. Facebook seems to be thinking of ways to make that job irrelevant. This new patent outlines algorithms designed to infer the gist of a link and create a snippet using the most commonly used words in the story. The system could even potentially tailor the summary it creates to each user it shows it to, playing up angles it thinks they would be most interested in — assuming the system had access to something like a user's Facebook account.
Making Facebook a little more interactive
If you're scrolling through your news feed, the overwhelming majority of content you'll see comes in rectangular boxes, usually containing a still image or a video for you to click on. Especially if you have autoplaying videos turned off, everything sort of blends together as a hodgepodge of images. Facebook, apparently, is thinking about ways to make things stand out a little bit more. This patent describes a system where the images in posts can animate and move with the screen as the user scrolls down. One example it gives, for an ad for a theoretical airline company, is a plane pulling down and taking off from a runway as the user scrolls down. It could be just interesting enough to stop the user's thumb before they mindlessly scroll away.
Microsoft
The strangest email marketing idea
Imagine you're emailing a friend about a video game you played last week, and you apparently can't remember anything about the game at all so you've asked your friend what it was called. Before you press send, your email provider alerts you that your friend, who currently has the email address "dp123af45@domain1.com," could have the much nicer "dipak@domain2.com" if they wanted, and asks if you want to include a note about it in your email. I'm not sure why I'd want to bug my friends like this, but maybe if they really care about their usernames on the internet, this is one way to get them to use Outlook. (To be fair: I have @mcwm reserved on just about every platform, so who am I to judge?)
Usually, patents have quite specific titles that describe the specific invention in the field they're working within. But this week Microsoft won a patent that's simply titled "Augmented Reality." It goes on to describe what we generally think of when talking about AR — three-dimensional virtual objects layered over the real world, projected through a headset — and even mentions the HoloLens. Although it mentions some of the specifics of the HoloLens, it's talking pretty generally about the concept. It'll be interesting to see whether Microsoft intends to actually use this patent as a way to go after any other competitors' products, or just to define what AR means to the company.
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Physical toys for your virtual games
One surefire way for a games maker to eke out more revenue from kids is to turn their game into a line of toys. Have cool robots or giant Vikings in your games? Some kid will want to play with them, and will happily bug their parents for eternity into buying them one. It's an added bonus if the toys can interact with the game. Nintendo has done this quite successfully with its Amiibo line of figurines, and there's the Starlink game, which literally revolves around plastic spaceships you have to build to play the game. It seems Microsoft wants to get in on the action, winning a patent this week for toys that could be added into Xbox games, such as a race car that kids could reconfigure to go faster in the game world, or a shield you buy for a knight that he gets to use in the game. It's like loot boxes, but you can play with them when the game is off.
