A new patent application Microsoft shows how its HoloLens glasses can help you easily find small objects like car keys.
More generally, the patent describes a system who can monitor the status of the items without instructions from users, keeping information about something that is important to your life.
The basic idea of the patent is quite simple. The HoloLens they have cameras that can make a spatial map of a room, and artificial vision technology can locate or track specific objects in a picture. Έτσι, αν, για παράδειγμα, βάλετε τα κλειδιά σας πάνω σε ένα τραπέζι, τα HoloLens θα μπορούσαν υποθετικά να τα εντοπίσουν μέσα από την κάμερα και αθόρυβα να σημειώσουν τη θέση τους. Όταν θελήσετε να φύγετε από το home, could give you the last known location of the keys, even if they've been covered by a newspaper or slipped under a sofa cushion.
Presently it looks like a very ineffective way to find your keys. You should always wear the smart glasses, which are now incredibly inconvenient. If you also drop your keys somewhere without looking at them, the system could not record their movement. Let that in a future with 24 / 7 augmented reality we may not even have keys.
Perhaps what is really interesting is not the idea of locating an object from HoloLens. It is the learning of HoloLens which items matter to you and their choice to monitor them. To be clear, you could define objects: for example, a traveler tells HoloLens to monitor his passport. Or it could even be food in your fridge reminding you what to buy when you go to the supermarket hours later.
And if you want to take it a step further, this technology could begin to find patterns of your every movement that are uniquely identified with you, something like fingerprints that is. In addition, Microsoft sees a near future where we will somehow always have one or more cameras on us that will record continuously. It may not be the bulky and uncomfortable HoloLens but don't forget that this is a patent that simply enshrines the patent for future profits.
