tequila bomb

These projections allow each interactive gaming device to know the position and orientation of the other interactive game devices in an interactive game environment defined by the reference coordinate frame. An interactive game display could be generated and displayed on each game device. Various interactive games (e.g., Laser Tag) can utilize the relative positions and orientations shared between the interactive game devices to provide an enriched interactive gaming experience.

Count me in! I have so many ideas for this.

The most fun I have had playing games, other than those on computers, has always been either enjoying Paintball or Laser Tag with cool, equally insane people.

I can’t wait to see people integrate their iPhone controlled drones into this gaming arena too.

“Dear website owner, congratulations on your excellent site, which includes features covered by our registered patent, #5,251,294. As the description indicates, many of the components on your pages, particularly your menus, rollover images, and shortcuts, are detailed in our claim. We would be delighted to lease these to you at a reasonable royalty rate of $80,000. Please call our offices at your convenience to arrange a payment schedule.”

Seems about as reasonable as claiming that you own the patent on “Sort by Date” with “Eye Candy”.

According to Law.com, Webvention acquired the property from the great patent gobbler itself, Intellectual Ventures, and has been having a grand old time with it ever since. The firm is suing Abercrombie and Fitch, Bed Bath & Beyond, Dell, Gamestop, E*Trade, Neiman Marcus, Visa and ten other companies for patent infringement on ’294. And the outfit wants jury trials in Texas. East Texas.

With the Patent System showing itself increasingly to be devoid of any way of coping with contemporary IP issues, and the US becoming a veritable Wild West where the new stage coach robbery is done in shady states with questionable legal systems, isn’t it time to take a new approach to all this?

I myself had to defend a Patent action recently, against a US company that was so paranoid about “losing its patent through dilution” that it was willing to pay me to rebrand a dollar app in the Apple App Store.

Mirror Worlds LLC filed the lawsuit in 2008, alleging that Apple had infringed on patents for creating “streams” of documents sorted by time. According to Bloomberg, a federal jury sided with Mirror Worlds on Friday, although specific details of the ruling were unavailable.

In effect this is a patent on “Sort by Date” with “Eye Candy”.

When Patents are this vague, and this wide reaching in their scope, no one should own them. Not Apple. Not Patent trolls.

I rest my case.

Canon’s looking to change the way you take HDR pictures. Previously, in order to capture images like these, you’d have to combine photos in post. With a new patent, the process will be done in-camera, at the pixel level.

High Dynamic Range pictures are taken by capturing the same subject at varying exposure levels and then combining those images in photo editing software. The idea is to create something that’s more detailed and potentially more representative of what your eye can see.

Worth noting. Not sure how much hold Canon have over the general concept though.

And Apple’s method is still a post process method as I understand it.

Future portable devices from Apple, such as iPhones and iPads, could be docked in both portrait and landscape positions, via an inductive connection on the back side of the device for charging and syncing.

Jobs has already promised WiFi syncing in future iPhones, iPods and iPads. That could significantly simplify any “inductive dock connection”.

Palm already has technology that does the charging side of this. Which may explain why Apple’s patent still seems geared towards a “touch” connection, rather than an “inductive” one. Perhaps that is one of the patents that Palm (now owned by HP) holds that was of interest to Apple when they flirted with buying the company.