And the purpose is...?
To send the patent back in time to 1988 in time to troll the following year's release of the Nintendo Power Glove.
The next territory in the Great Patent Land-Grab is at the end of your arms: in a patent granted last year that’s just hit publication, the Chocolate Factory gets its hands on using gloves as a user interface. US patent 8,009,151 plants the Google flag on “methods and systems for gathering and conveying information, for …
IIRC the power glove did not have a camera.
However, if memory serves me right, surgical gloves with a camera on them have been around for a long time. It is just one of the many forms of an endoscope. You do not wave these though - you generally stick 'em in places known as "where sun does not shine".
As expected, shortly following the release of Google's patented G-love a popular internet site known as YouTube, also owned by Google, has crashed. We understand the YouTube servers all simultaneously failed following a massive upload of videos consisting of hours of nose picking, arse scratching and other videos. Officials of YouTube didn't say twat those videos consisted of but we are confident our viewing audience will be able to finger it out.
" the method may include using a detector to record a series of images of an environment and detecting a predetermined motion by comparing two or more images in a series.”
This is NOT a description of an aid for the visually impaired as you imply, but a method for capturing gestural inputs without the need for dedicated surface against which to perform them. Kind of an optical mouse built into the finger.
Surely this is too broad for a patent?
If not, i think its time to patent the process of seeing someone else's idea and patenting it...
I've seen gloves designed to detect motion before.. so prior art me thinks.. .but if Apple get away with their pathetic patents, then we have to let Google have a few daft ones... So far Googles not as quick to sue as apple is... but we will see...
Okay, I read the patent summary (don't have time to wade through the entire thing at the moment) and I still say that between obviousness (camera on finger? why, whodathunkit?!) and prior art (optical mouse, for one), this is just a prime example of the modern patent system gone awry.
Is ANYTHING obvious anymore?
When I was about 10, I had to watch 'Blake's 7' on a B&W portable TV in the spare room as the main TV was being watched by the rest of the family for something else (can't rememberer what). The antenna was a bit dodgy and I found that by moving my hands in a particular way I could improve or degrade reception. At the time I thought this could be a really cool way to control devices. I figured that you could wear rings of various metals on your fingers and the EMF broadcast from a transmitter could be modified by moving your fingers in a certain predetermined way (ie touch thumb to little finger to change channel up) to alter the signal received at the nominated device. At the time I'd never heard of the Theremin, and it was many years later that I saw something similar in the Steven Spielberg film 'Minority Report'.