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Google glasses gets raft of new patents, sniffs lawsuits coming from miles away
Google will find four more granted patents for Project Glass sitting on its over-sized doorstep this morning. The company can now claim rights over the design of the right half of the device, where the camera hangs over the eye and where the innards are housed within the band along the side. It's also patented the nose-pad sensor that knows when it's being worn, plus the ability to represent ambient sounds on the screen with range and direction info. Finally, it's also got rights on using each eyepiece as a separate display, with the example shown above demonstrating a map in one eye and navigation instructions in the other. The more we sift through the paperwork, the more we're reminded of the Dominion Warship headsets from Deep Space Nine -- but that could be just because we've been locked indoors for too long.
Microsoft granted patent for wearable EMG device
Those muscle spasms? They're now good for something. Okay, so Microsoft's just-granted patent for a wearable EMG device doesn't really thrive off of involuntary twitching and such, but it does use your movements to control your smartphone, notebook and other gadgets. The "Wearable Electromyography-Based Controller," which we first glimpsed back in 2010, uses sensors to interpret the electrical signals generated by a user's muscles, and then communicates with the wearer's computer via a wireless (or wired) connection. Redmond envisions the wearable device in various incarnations: as an armband equipped with sensors, a shirt, eyeglasses and even nodes attached directly to the user's body. In the armband example, motion control could be used to interact with a PMP while the user is jogging. No matter the setup, a calibration process allows the system to locate specific sensors and collect information based on specific gestures or movements, which means playing Guitar Hero with only an air guitar may someday be a reality after all.
Google voting patent democratizes restaurant choices, Top Model eliminations
Let's imagine you're both fortunate enough to have nine friends and you want to take them all out to dinner... tonight! So you send them all an invitation message, but the restaurant you've picked offends half of them for some reason. You suggest something else, and the other half object, making it a drawn-out and painful process. Worse still is that all of the SMS cross-talk is going to eat into your plan unless everyone's signed up to ChatOn. Instead, wouldn't it be great if you could just text four options in a single text message and let good old-fashioned democracy work its plan-saving course? Well thanks to the patent that Google was granted today, perhaps in the future you'll be able to do exactly that. Just remember that if you always want to get your own way, make sure both your voting group and choices are heavily biased in your favor, you wouldn't want to get dragged out to the Cabbage Soup Shack by accident, would you?
