Me and some friends are working on the idea of using the compass, accelerometer/gyroscope and gps to visualize architectural sites on mobile devices.
The concept is easy to think and also easy to make. Most of the work is to interpolate some data and making a smooth intergration with each device.
I started on this more then a year ago, but recently started to work more on this.
Now I stumbled on an application and a company behind it says that it has a pending “US provisional patent application” on doing exactly what I described above.
Are they serious?
Will such a thing get approved?
I mean this is something that the mobile devices are almost doing this free for you. You just have to write a few lines of code and assemble all this together.
And they want to patent this? Come on!
Also apps like “Layar” do this kind of stuff already.
yeah such hot air crap really gets patented. Welcome to the world of hot air patents known as software patents.
But if there is previous work it can be hard to get it approved. also the question is what they patented. you can look into the patent request to find out about that. perhaps they use a very specific algorithm for example
I went through this once in another industry. These guys were bold enough to approach other firms with similar products offering to license them technology they were already using.
It’s true that there is a legal concept of “Prior Art”. But our system is piss poor at understanding technology and its a crap shoot.
As Dreamora suggests, read the patent application closely. There are lawyers the specialize in software patents. If they get the patent, call one. We were able to avoid a fight with a relatively small alteration to our product.Contesting based on Prior Art would have been too costly. We changed things enough to avoid infringement of their patent instead. Again this is on a product that was already out at the time the patent was granted. Sorry you’re going through this.
Here’s a bit of background on what we went through. I’m not with either firm in the article. We didn’t settle. But it will give you some insight into what it cost those that did. Link
There is previous work.
The point is that they are trying to patent a simple methodology.
I mean simple use of the compass and the gyroscope to visualize content.
Gruhm, thanks for the extra info!