You know that heart-shaped hand gesture that DJ’s such as Armin Van Buuren, Deadmau5, Skrillex, Avicii, and….well, just about every DJ and EDM fan use at performances to “show the love”? Well, Google is patenting it. Yes, that is right, Google is patenting a hand gesture. With the new Google Glass technology, the company originally filed a patent back in 2011, with the intent to patent certain hand gestures to “signify what is important.” The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted the patent on October 15th of this year.
Basically, the hand-heart gesture used by artists and fans in pop culture and the music scene will now be interpreted as a “like” by Google. But that is not the only thing; it turns out that the gesture will also be used to set up photos (i.e. using two L-shapes will denote the scene inside the square boundaries as the subject of a photo). Take a look at the diagram below, for example:
If this whole idea of patenting a hand gesture isn’ t confusing enough, take a look at the actual text of the patent itself:
“In accordance with example embodiments, hand gestures can be used to provide user input to a wearable computing device, and in particular to identify, signify, or otherwise indicate what may be considered or classified as important or worthy of attention or notice. A wearable computing device, which could include a head-mounted display (HMD) and a video camera, may recognize known hand gestures and carry out particular actions in response. Particular hand gestures could be used for selecting portions of a field of view of the HMD, and generating images from the selected portions. The HMD could then transmit the generated images to one or more applications in a network server communicatively connected with the HMD, including a server or server system hosting a social networking service.”
Yadda, yadda, yadda….blah, blah, blah….technical term….hand gesture….we’re just making shit up as we go along….confused yet? Questions? Like, how is it possible to patent a hand gesture? Will it have any implications on the actual use of the hand gesture by artists during performances, or in photo ops?
Whatever the case may be, we are pretty annoyed that Google even made us think about all of this. But it does beg the question….if Google can patent the hand-heart gesture, can we patent this?
[via EDM Tunes and Ravers Choice]