Patent Law Practice Center

A Survey of Some Interesting New Patents from Microsoft

According to statistics released earlier this year by the Intellectual Property Owners Association, Microsoft is near the top of the list when it comes to companies applying for and receiving U.S. patents. In 2013, the company was issued 2,814 patents, the 6th-most globally for that year and an increase for Microsoft by 4.1 percent over the previous year’s totals.

While Microsoft is primarily known for computer software, personal computers and other consumer electronics, they pursue a wide assortment of intriguing innovations, as evidenced by a recent review of issued U.S. patents to Microsoft.

As a major developer of computing products, it makes sense that Microsoft would have invested a lot of time and money into creating enhanced user interfaces for its computing products.  The natural user interface (NUI) developed by Microsoft for its Xbox Kinect system is further enhanced by U.S. Patent No. 8897491, which is titled System for Finger Recognition and Tracking (image shown left). This patent claims a method for generating a model of a user’s hands including one or more fingers which involves analyzing position and depth data of an image to recognize a user’s hand and techniques for discerning features of a hand. This system is capable of identifying commands made by fingers, which have typically been too small and subtle for conventional NUI systems to identify.

Speech recognition is an important field of development in user interfacing for computer resources and Microsoft has extended its holdings in this field through the issue of U.S. Patent No. 8892439, entitled Combination and Federation of Local and Remote Speech Recognition. This patent claims an article with a computer-readable storage device containing instructions that enable a computer to receive audio data indicating a task and performing speech recognition on the audio data utilizing local and remote recognizers. This system is intended to support the proliferation of applications utilizing automatic speech recognition (ASR) which can require access to large stores of data, slowing down mobile processes.

Intriguing mobile interfaces are also the focus of U.S. Patent No. 8902255, issued under the title Mobile Platform for Augmented Reality. This patent protects a system comprising a mobile image processing manager that obtains three-dimensional image data associated with an observation environment within a line of sight of an imaging device and a navigational plan engine for determining a navigational plan for a mobile platform. This system would enable the superimposing of digital features onto an image captured by a mobile device or may otherwise project virtual images onto a surrounding environment.

A couple of patents which caught our eye during our recent survey of Microsoft would aid a variety of meetings which use Microsoft computing products as meeting platforms. Techniques for identifying the participants of a meeting who are located inside of a physical meeting room are outlined by U.S. Patent No. 8892123, which is titled Identifying Meeting Attendees Using Information from Devices. The computer-implemented method involves automatically recognizing the physical presence of a mobile device in proximity to a physical meeting place and including a profile associated with that mobile device as an attendant at the meeting. This innovation is designed to remove the manual nature of confirming a roster of meeting attendees at a physical meeting place. Meetings taking place through online platforms are the target of the technology protected by U.S. Patent No. 8890926, titled Automatic Identification and Representation of Most Relevant People in Meetings (image shown below). The method involves presenting participants of a meeting in order of their relevancy which involves categorizing the participants based on a set of factors and presenting participants in a user interface gallery which emphasizes relevancy categories by utilizing a spatial grouping scheme. This system is configured to present meeting participants to other meeting participants in a way that provides a better meeting context than systems that focus on presenting the loudest talker.

We’ll close our discussion of patents recently issued to Microsoft with a look at a technology that will help those with strict dietary restrictions find the perfect meal while eating out at a restaurant. U.S. Patent No. 8903708, which is titled Analyzing Restaurant Menus in View of Consumer Preferences, claims a method of analyzing food items available at a restaurant that involves storing a list of food criteria on a mobile device, receiving menu data about available food items at the device and displaying menu data on the mobile device which has been filtered based on a user’s dietary needs. This invention should be of interest to those with medical conditions, like high blood pressure or diabetes, as well as other preferences, such as price or calories.