A new Microsoft patent application shows that HoloLens glasses can help you easily find small items such as car keys.
More generally, the patent describes a system which can monitor the state of objects without instructions from users, maintaining information for something that is important to your life.
The basic idea of the patent is quite simple. The HoloLens have a cameras that can make a spatial map of a room, and artificial vision technology can locate or track specific objects in an image. So if, for example, you put your keys on a table, the HoloLens could hypothetically detect them through the camera and silently note their location. When you want to leave the house, they could give you the last known location of the keys, even if they have 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 each of you movementwhich can be identified exclusively with you, something like fingerprints. 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.
