The future of camera technology
I am a bit of a nature photographer so i decided to take a look at what advances in camera technology may be coming up in the near future. Besides having fun exploring the technology, geek that i am, i am also looking for domain names that might reflect a potentially important technology.
3D Photography
My first thought was 3D photography and display. 3D movies are being more popular and studios are releasing more and more. Could there be something to this for the future? 3dphotography.us and .mobi are available but most of the obvious ones are taken.
The U.S. Patent Office
I decided to use a resource I haven’t blogged about yet i.e. the U.S. patent office. You can search and read patents if you feel so inclined. They do make heavy reading and you have to know how to read them. However we are not looking to legally examine patents so we can skip those that get too technical.
Patents have a background and summary and these are the most useful part to get a general idea of what the patent is about. The claims themselves you should leave for the lawyers.
I searched for “issue date 2007″ and “camera” and “consumer” and “3D”. This is done using “ISD/$/$/2007 and camera and 3d and consumer” with boolean operators (and or not etc). Used enough terms to narrow the number of patents into a reasonable range. I usually try for about 100.
3D Projector
The first one that caught my eye was for a 2D/3D projector. The background section talks about portable devices and the limited screen size and increasing functionality of these devices. To get around the small screen size, they propose that a projector possibly used LEDs as a light source.
“Another issue that is of interest to large audiences in image projection is the issue of 3-dimensional (3D) projection. The current data projectors are not inherently capable of showing full color 3D images and the special devices that are designed to do so are expensive and rare. The media industry increases the offering on 3D movies, games and other entertainment only if 3D capable devices are commonly used.”
Will laptops have built-in projectors? Could cellphones project a 3D image? 3Dlaptop.com, 3Dcellphone.com and 3dphone.com are already snapped up.
Location Data
The other common theme which may be with us quite soon is the ability to automatically have GPS location data in video and photos. With the advances in online mapping, photos can already be tagged onto maps. If the camera has a built in GPS then this process could be automated. PhotoGPS.com is taken but as with the previous names, a smattering of other tlds are available.
Computer Agents for Surveys
Another interesting idea is “Virtual human interface for conducting surveys” patent. “Because it recognizes and understands human communication on one side and technology communication on the other, the virtual human interface can translate meaning between the two. In the survey context, the virtual human interface can ask questions in human terms, receive responses provided in human terms, translate the responses into machine terms, perform machine-based processing on the machine terms, and then translate the machine-processed information back into human terms for communication to a human.”
To reduce the cost of data collection in surveys, this patent proposes using a virtual interface to conduct the survey and process the data. They propose an interactive entertaining computer agent that would interact with the participant to collect the data and report it already processed. You can see this has wider implications and uses. Names like VirtualInterface.com and VirtualHumanInterface are possible. The company holding the patent have trademarked Verbot. Catchy.
Merchandise loss from bottom of basket, BoB
One final patent: “Method of merchandising for checkout lanes”. Sounds boring but the background makes for interesting reading. Supermarkets are actually fascinating places and i will have to blog about them another day. Your shopping cart often has a lower shelf under the basket itself and people put things there. This is called bottom of basket or BoB. “Estimates suggest that a typical supermarket can experience between $3,000 to $5,000 of bottom-of-the-basket revenue losses per lane per year.”
People either leave forgetting about the items or intentionally don’t pay. “Another source of BoB loss is due to cashier fraud, which can occur when the cashier knows items are on the bottom of the basket and chooses not to ring them up or manually rings up an alternative, less expensive item. This practice is known as collusion or sweethearting”
Ok, so whats the big deal? “For a major grocery chain with 1,000 stores, the potential revenue recovery can reach in excess of $50 million dollars annually.” If someone can solve this problem, there is money to be made. Got any ideas for a generic name for this technology?
Hopefully you can see that patents are a rich source of ideas but the trick as always is to predict which ones will be adopted and become mainstream. Again focus on the summary and background and skip over any trademark names.
The U.S. Patent Office searchÂ
