Excercise 5 - 3/27/2018

Relevant Existing Intellectual Property:

Patent:

Patents would provide protection for any proprietary hardware we would develop.

In the interest of avoiding patent infringement, while also exploring similar product ideas, it was in our best interest to identify some patents similar to or in the realm of what we are trying to make. In the remainder of this section we outline our findings.

In 2009, AFA Micro Co. introduced a patent for a wireless wrist mouse. The circuitry used includes numerous command motions. (Source: Motion Sensitive Gesture Device)

The air control mouse utilizes an electronic wearable device to track inertia. (Source: Air control mouse and the mouse pointer movement method and apparatus)

The mouse on fingers uses a physical hardware box, and finger sleeve, which is tracked with photoelectric sensors and a micro-switch.(Source: Mouse on fingers)

The Man-machine interaction ring is a wearable ring and providing input to a computer by measuring a variety of different variables across what they describe as an 'action plane'. From the patent abstract, "The man-machine interaction ring comprises an acceleration sensor module, a gyroscope module, a distance sensor module, a microphone sensor module and a microprocessor module." The microprocessor device enables multi-point gestures by processing and controlling output of the ring. To track clicking and scrolling, the ring tracks sound from sliding your fingers, to which end it translates into one of the given input options. (Source: Man-machine interaction ring supporting multi-point touch gestures)

Trademark/Service Mark:

In the interest of protecting the name Marionette, it would be of interest to us to trademark the name. Any products we would sell would be under this brand name.

The only other Marionette company or service is Marionette.js which is a java script framework. The product line we would sell under the name Marionette would be entirely consumer hardware and software for it to coordinate with the users operating system.

Copyright:

Marionette would benefit from getting a copyright on its software solution. Therefore we could protect the methods used to translate readings from the physical device to the mouse cursor.

The following paper dictates using computer vision and image processing to calculate mouse movement using your hand. The process defines a way for a computer to recognize fingers and motion in real time. (Source: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7307391/ )

Copyleft:

There is mouse control library Ishara, that provides an interface for controlling a mouse pointer with finger gestures through the use of colored markers on their fingers. Ishara is a c++ platform built for Linux. (Source: Ishara - Mouse Control with Gesture)

There is an existing code repository that uses Android's built-in accelerometer and gyro for controlling a cursor on a computer. (Source: Android-Controlled-Cursor)

OpenTL is a general tracking library based on the Open Computer Vision Library(Also known as OpenCV). OpenTL provides a way for users to compare 2-D models from a camera feed or a still frame image with the features of a predefined model and prior models. OpenTL is designed to track gestures without the use of markers. Markers are generally coloured tapes that can easily be tracked with a computer camera in real time. Following hand gestures without markers is a lot more difficult, and requires much more computation. OpenTL currently supports Ubuntu Linux and Windows. (Source: http://www.opentl.org/library.html)

Standards:

Ideally the end product will follow the USB HID protocol. This would enable the user to plug the device in and have the mandatory drivers installed automatically. A custom software package will be required to interpret the input.