Apple Granted Patent for Sports Sensors
Think Major League Baseball's stats and live video iPhone app is cool? Imagine what Apple could do with technology it was granted a patent for this week: a network of sensors that deliver real-time velocity, impact, rotation and other data from sporting event participants to the web. Imagine your iPhone's accelerometer placed inside a boxer's glove, a snowboarder's snow suit or a NASCAR driver's car - with the information captured delivered to your iPhone or Apple TV while you watch the competition either in person or remotely.
Would you pay a premium for an event ticket that includes real time stats like that delivered to your iPhone? I would. Of course Apple is granted all kinds of patents all the time and only some of them amount to anything - but this one is very cool.
MacNN reported in depth today on US patent 7,552,031, ("Personal items network, and associated methods"), filed two and a half years ago and granted yesterday. News-watcher extraordinaire Atul Arora sent us the link as a tip. The patent appears related to the "find my iPhone" technology reported on yesterday, but all the examples in the patent application are based on real-time sports statistic monitoring and are quite interesting.
Call it augmented reality, call it ubiquitous wearable computing, call it Web 3.0 if you must. It's widely believed that networks of sensors feeding data into computers for analysis and visualization are going to be a big thing in the near term future. Value-adds built on top of that data hold huge potential for the development of software we can't even imagine today. This vision is big in the electrical utility world, but private sector innovators are being hampered by the lack of vision seen in public utility companies. When it comes to the world of sports, the sky could be the limit. Imagine attending a sporting event and being able to select from a variety of apps for the app store, built just for that kind of sport.
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yes, thats is a good idea. Thanks a lot
The start to real time internet.
But we will have same services for other devices phone?
Imagine if this same data was applied to games?
It would be cool to be able to put real-time data into a game, so you "virtually" participate in a race while it's happening.
Or, load the data from a boxing match to see how well you could fare against a heavyweight on your Wii.
Really cool stuff.
This is great - sure, it may never see the light of day, but given some of the Android apps coming out that are sports-based data experiences (http://www.influxinsights.com/blog/article/2322/augmented-championship-tennis-reality-from-ibm.html), you never know.
This type of stuff was patented 10 years ago by a production company in Boston tracking force and acceleration and integrating it into video displays...
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Could we also have sensors and stats for sexual intercourse?
I've been seeing a few entries similar to this one lately and it seems to me that this is becoming a bit invading. Not a big fan of that kind of scrutiny...
I'd like to see those sensors inside a soccer ball, instantly drawing into my browser's window the ball trajectory graphs of soccer matches , graphs like the ones that I scribbled by hand 13 years ago onto the pages of my notebook ... ( http://www.harsmedia.com/SoundBlog/Archief/00683.php )
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Apple Granted Patent for Sports Sensors http://bit.ly/imcMk [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2313793884]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 12, 2009 10:36 AM
I've been seeing a few entries similar to this one lately and it seems to me that this is becoming a bit invading. Not a big fan of that kind of scrutiny..
Thanks a lot..