Patentseed

Tapping may be the new way to interact two devices.  Sony Ericsson’s patent application 11/972,712 teaches of a method for two devices to perform an “application specific action” when those two devices are tapped together.  How is this useful?  Well, let’s look at two examples cited by the patent application. 

In the first diagram, we see how a headset may be tapped on a phone to activate it and perhaps tapped again to deactivate it.  This is infinitely more convenient than navigating through the phone’s menu system. 

The second diagram shows a more creative reason for tapping.  Here, tapping two phones together spans the image across the two screens.  Pretty cool huh?

Tired of taking forever to scroll through that 1000+ contact list of yours on your iPhone?  You could clean up your outdated contact list and remove the 8 out of 10 “Tom” that you no longer recognize, or you could get a future Sony Ericsson phone with scroll speed control.  Sony Ericsson’s patent application 11/941,306 covers the concept of adjusting the scroll speed based on where you swipe.  Swipe in the left region, up or down, and it will scroll at 1x (normal).  If you want accelerated scroll, swipe using the center region.  If you want even faster scroll, and your eyes can handle 5x, go ahead and use the right region.  We think this is pretty nifty.

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?

Sony apparently doesn’t think so. Rather than having just static images, Sony aims to bring “moving images” (i.e., video). It’s not clear exactly how they plan on presenting this data to end-users, but Sony’s patent application 11/935,098 reveals how they plan on capturing the “moving images” and associated meta-data. The idea of comparing an area throughout time (day vs. night, different seasons, different years, etc.) is discussed. The patent application states: “In this fashion, a user of the geographical map service may also see a video recording made on a certain location or a number of locations during different seasons.” Not sure how video is an advantage here though. The application goes on to state: “Moreover, if the recording is made from a vehicle in motion, the user of the service interested in getting driving instructions from the interactive map service may also get a much better idea about how to drive…” We’re not completely sold.  Good luck Sony.

Earlier this year, we saw Mimi Switch announce a remote control that relies on facial expressions.  Hopefully they are aware of Sony’s patent application 11/933,611, titled “Generating Music Playlist Based on Facial Expression.”  That, along with happy “David,” just about describes the patent application.  Alas Sony, what happened to the glory days of the cassette Walkman?