Patentseed

If your massive multiplayer gaming character is more popular than you are, Sony’s patent application 12/360,070 may be of great interest to you.  It looks like Sony will be making it much easier for you to capture video clips of your game play and posting to your website.  The patent application covers:

• Manually or automatically triggering the start of a recording.  Automatic triggering can occur by a criteria you specify.
• Capturing the video prior to the start trigger (which is cached for this purpose) and after the end trigger.
• Uploading to a blog, web page, or social networking site

The figures reveal what the application might look like.  As seen in one of the figures, this could be a universal video capture application across all of Sony’s games.

If I am reading Sony’s patent application 12/270,924 correctly, I’d have to say it has dubious applications.  From my take, it appears that Sony is desperating trying to catch up in the motion sensing arena and seems forced to figure out something not yet done with motion sensing game controllers.  Here’s what they came up with.  A game controller that vibrates when you pull a trigger (such as firing a gun), wherein the vibration is detected by the motion sensor in the controller and sent to the gaming device.  I suppose that is how the gaming device will know you pulled the trigger.  I can’t seem to wrap my head around how this is better than just sending a signal from the controller to the gaming device to say the trigger has been pulled.  Perhaps I’m not getting something, but a second read didn’t help.  Anybody else want to take a stab at interpreting?

As our previous blog notes, Microsoft has done its share to advance the mouse.    A new patent application discloses a mouse with a ring-shaped scroll wheel.  Wait, don’t we already have that you ask?  Well, sort of.  We have a scroll wheel, but it’s typically a solid wheel, and not hollow in the center as the “ring-shaped” signifies.  Here’s Microsoft’s explanation:

Prior scroll wheels are generally solid circular wheels with a hub positioned at the center. These prior scroll wheels are rotatably mounted to a mouse body by an axle extending through a center hub of the scroll wheel. The center hub, axle, and associated support structure for the scroll wheel occupy valuable space inside the mouse, and their shape are accommodated by the mouse body, resulting in a relatively standardized appearance, including height profile, among many prior computer mouse designs.

Patent application 11/938,798 may provide marginal improvement for the mouse, but the true significance may be with other controllers.  As the patent application points out, a gaming controller with a ring-shaped scroll wheel may be next.