Thursday, February 13, 2014

Oh, patents! Do you heart?

Copyright © Françoise Herrmann

 

The verb to “google” was included in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) in 2006. It now looks as though the googlese verb to “heart” might be next!


Indeed Google Inc., filed for a patent titled “Hand gestures to signify what is important”, and in particular, the heart hand-gesture, used to frame a field of view (FOV) that you “heart”, and that Google Glass can recognize as your own, extract from the video data, tag as liked, before sending the image that your hands surround in the shape of symbolic heart,  to a dedicated application on a connected server.  


So go ahead heart away all day… tomorrow is Valentine’s day.  And you can probably steal this heart hand-gesture without fearing that you are infringing on US8558759, since Google Inc.,’s  patented heart hand-gesture includes visual recognition means, video analysis and extraction means, plus lots of hardware and wireless technology driven by proprietary algorithms!


US8558759 also includes the “L” shaped hand gesture (with attached recognition, analysis and extraction algorithms, and soft and hard wiring), performed with your index and forefinger, and used to frame an image, in the similar manner that you form a symbolic heart with both your hands, to enclose a FOV.  


Below you will find the abstract of the Google Inc., patent titled: Hand gestures to signify  what is important, with a patent image of the heart  hand gesture, and  above the patent “L” shaped hand gesture,  and a Google hand heart image.   

 


Abstract
In accordance with example embodiments, hand gestures can be used to provide user input to a wearable computing device, and in particular to identify, signify, or otherwise indicate what may be considered or classified as important or worthy of attention or notice. A wearable computing device, which could include a head-mounted display (HMD) and a video camera, may recognize known hand gestures and carry out particular actions in response. Particular hand gestures could be used for selecting portions of a field of view of the HMD, and generating images from the selected portions. The HMD could then transmit the generated images to one or more applications in a network server communicatively connected with the HMD, including a server or server system hosting a social networking service. 
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xox

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