Digital Worlds On the Rise
The FedInvent Application Newsletter for January 6, 2022
Hello from FedInvent,
On Thursday, January 6, 2022, the Patent Office published 7,559 pre-grant patent applications. One hundred sixty-six (166) benefitted from taxpayer funding.
The FedInvent Patent Application Report is here. If you'd like to browse by federal department, start here.
The Metaverse Is Trending
Merriam-Webster defined metaverse as the real word for a virtual world. Metaverse defines the concept of a highly immersive digital world where people gather to socialize, play, and work. Meta-anything was one of Merriam-Webster's top ten words for 2021. Metaverse is trending. According to Bernstein Research, "metaverse" mentions on public company conference calls rose from just one in Q2 2020 to 449 in 3Q 2021. Metaverse in the transcripts is an outbreak of buzzword compliance by C-level executives.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the annual Las Vegas gathering of the technorati, showcased the metaverse this year. The technology prognosticators at the CES 2022 Consumer Electronics Show believe the metaverse will soon be bigger than the physical world. (The data center operators are pleased.)
Even in a year when half of CES was virtual and in-person attendance was low, all things metaverse were big. The products on display included virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, graphics processing units (GPUs) for real-time high-speed interactions between humans and the metaverse, high-resolution displays, haptic and "tactile telepresence" devices to give humans a physical experience in the digital world. There were also a host of metaverse building platforms.
In the world of federal innovation, the word metaverse hasn't shown up yet. Instead, researchers and scientists use more expansive words in their research grants and patent applications. They like to cover all the bases. Federal researchers and scientists are both builders and consumers of the latest metaverse technologies regardless of whether the feds are buzzword compliant. In some areas, taxpayer-funded R&D is ahead of the consumer metaverse market in delivering new metaverse-related capabilities.
The Federal Metaverse
The federal R&D contributed new inventions focused on generating avatars and creating increasingly human traits and behaviors. This work has gone into making the avatars as "human" as possible. For example, the Army Research Office funded research by the University of Southern California that became US Patent 11195318, "Rapid avatar capture and simulation using commodity depth sensors." The invention enables automatic generation of a 3D avatar of a living being causing sensors to generate 3D data for a 3D shape and appearance, creating a virtual character, aka an avatar. The researchers have been innovating for the metaverse for a long time. The patent leads back to a provisional patent application filed back in 2014. USC also holds a patent for software to create realistic hair for avatars. This research was funded by The Institute for Creative Technologies is funded by the Army Research Laboratory. More inventions for creating increasingly human digital humans.
The University of Colorado received a patent for technology used for synthesizing mouth movements, so your avatar moves its lips in the same shape as individual allophones, the spoken sounds of a particular language (11145100). This work was paid for by the Department of Education and the NIH National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).
The University of Central Florida, located in Orlando, received US Patent 11106357 for "Low Latency Tactile Telepresence" technology. This technology catalogs an array of predefined touch gestures that are abstracted into cataloged values and invoked either by pattern matching, by assigned name, or using visual indicia. Isolated users can exchange gentle arm strokes or soft arm pats. A user reaching out to another isolated user might be able to issue a shoulder tap when simply saying hello to get a remote user's attention. This invention includes the integration of special purpose haptic devices like sensor gloves and sensory sleeves.
NSF-funded researchers at the University of Arizona developed eye-tracked head-mounted displays that merge virtual and physical scenes. For example, the technology may enable a physician to see a 3D rendering of a patient's anatomical structures or CT images superimposed onto the patient's anatomy, such as the abdomen. Like other metaverse innovations, the inventors note that big bulky headsets aren't as desirable as a head-mounted mobile display solution that offers much more attractive image quality and screen size than other popular mobile platforms such as smartphones and PDAs. The goal is an HMD mobile display as elegant as a pair of sunglasses. It may become an integral part of many people's daily activities to instantly retrieve information and connect with people. (PDA is still a useful word in describing mobile devices in the patentsphere.)
The Boundaries of the Metaverse are Fluid
The boundaries of the metaverse are fluid at the moment. Consider the avatar. We've already seen the term hologram morph into avatar. Avatar is now morphing from digital avatars to real-world avatars.
The concept of an avatar, a "real-world avatar," that operates in the physical world seems like an oxymoron. This real-world avatar violates the idea that an avatar is a strictly digital phenomenon. So what is a real-world avatar? Let us resolve this bit of semantic whiplash: what is a real-world avatar and its role in a digital/physical world? Real-world avatars are robots.
How does this work? Robots enable inhabitants of the metaverse to traverse digital and physical worlds seamlessly. It works like this. A human engineer is called into action because something is going wrong on the other side of the globe. The human engineer steps into the metaverse and launches its digital avatar. The digital engineer avatar wanders around the digital twin of the manufacturing facility or data center on the other side of the world to figure out what's happening. The digital avatar engineer figures out that physical maintenance is required, probably by using its vast store of artificial intelligence data. The fix requires physical parts, not software mechanics. So instead of hopping on a flight to a far and distant facility, the human engineer or maybe the digital avatar launches the real-world avatar. The real-world robot springs into action to make the fix.
And how does this relate to the federal innovation ecosphere? DARPA and the Army have been developing the virtual battlespace and techniques for using the metaverse for developing battlefield strategy. The scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab received a patent for a digital world simulation technology. The patent enables executing a simulation plan in a specific theater of operation — the National Mall in Washington, an international airport such as Los Angeles International Airport, or a cruise ship. The simulation plan specifies incidents, such as an explosion of a dirty bomb and the release of toxic gases (e.g., sarin gas). The simulation plan specifies detectors, such as spectrometers and radiation detectors, used in the incident exercise. The simulation plan also specifies entities involved in the incident exercise, such as people, vehicles, and robots. It may not be long before federal researchers are building their own digital to real-world avatar capabilities.
This Week's Contribution to the Federal Metaverse
Inventors from the University of Central Florida started 2022 by adding a new published patent application metaverse invention to its patent pipeline. The Patent Office published, 20220001877, "Medical Monitoring Virtual Human with Situational Awareness." This invention cites the inventors' NSF grant called "Collaborative Research: Augmented Reality Agents with Pervasive Awareness, Appearance, and Abilities." This application focuses on reducing a human's anxiety in a trust-sensitive autonomous control system.
Here the virtual human, the avatar, is part of an autonomous vehicle, medical diagnostic system, or a financial transaction system. The real-world avatar is the autonomous vehicle or system? The avatar has many skills. "A rendered virtual human turns a steering wheel, depresses a start or stop button, selects a "stock buy" option on an interface, and injects medicine through a syringe into an IV port, respectively.
The application describes a cast of virtual humans and their behavior:
The virtual human is rendered in the uniform of a nurse. (I know that would lower my stress level.)
A virtual human physician in a relaxed state. (Whitecoat, loose shoulders, leaning on the virtual door jamb?)
A virtual human physician in a concerned state. (An avatar with a furrowed brow?)
A virtual human physician in an action state contacting a real-life attending nurse. (A real-life human nurse is probably going to be thrilled interacting with an avatar doctor in action.)
A virtual human police officer rendered to a non-occupant wearing an augmented reality headset. (So a person walking down the street with hip cool augmented reality glasses can see a virtual police officer?)
A vehicle backing into a parking spot shows a virtual human on a dashboard display screen guiding the vehicle's path. (A virtual friend saying keep coming, keep coming, stop?)
Projection of human heads onto the windshield and driver-side door conveying visual acknowledgment of a cyclist. (An avatar face that says, "Hey cyclist, I see you, and I'm not going to mow you down?)
A virtual human police officer rendered to a non-occupant wearing an augmented reality headset. (Huh?)
We wrote about the University's earlier autonomous vehicle avatar back in October. We're still not keen on looking up in the rearview mirror on one of the newly improved highways and seeing an avatar on the driver's side of an autonomous electric tractor-trailer either. (In the world of autonomous vehicles, is the term "driver's side" even appropriate anymore?)
And Add A Virtual Karen
One of the publications associated with this research is called "An Automated Virtual Receptionist for Recognizing Visitors and Assuring Mask Wearing." The inventors have proposed creating a virtual Karen to scold humans for not having a mask. Another COVID invention.
The FedInvent Metaverse Is Trending article highlights some of the other federal metaverse inventions. The federal metaverse is expanding.
On to this week's numbers.
Patent Applications By The Numbers
On Thursday, January 6, 2021, the Patent Office published 7,559 pre-grant patent applications. One hundred sixty-six (166) benefitted from taxpayer funding. Here are the numbers.
One hundred fifty-seven (157) patent applications have Government Interest Statements.
Twenty-seven (27) applicants have an applicant or an assignee that is a government agency.
The 166 applications have 243 department-level funding citations.
These applications are the work of 538 inventors.
The 549 American inventors come from 36 states and the District of Columbia.
The Top Three States This Week:
California
New York
North Carolina
Thirty-four (34) foreign inventors are from 15 countries.
There are 125 applications (75%) where at least one assignee is a college or University, the HERD.
A Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDCs) is the assignee or applicant on ten applications.
A federal department is the sole assignee on 12 patent applications.
Application Count By Department
The Health Complex
The table below shows the number of funding citations where the recipient cites the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the institutes at the National Institutes of Health, and other subagencies that are part of HHS, the Health Complex.
The First 2022 Bayh-Dole Scofflaw
The first Bayh-Dole scofflaw of 2022 is Rampart Communications. They're a repeat offender. Last year Rampart Communications received five patents last year that didn't have the statutorily required information in their government interest statement. They are the purveyors of interesting, secure communications technology. The FedInvent prognosticators assigned this patent to the National Security Agency.
(If you're new to FedInvent, a Bayh-Dole scofflaw is an entity that doesn't provide contract number and agency information in their government interest statement. The majority of the scofflaws are defense contractors and entities that work for the Intelligence Community.)
Before We Go
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Thank you for reading FedInvent. Next up, January 11, 2022, taxpayer-funded patents.
The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators.
Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital or reach us on Twitter at @FedInvent.