Trends member Neer Sharma has been rounding up the best corporate patents every week for his must-read newsletter Patent Drop.
Here are some of Sharma’s recent findings, with the first 2 patents exclusive for readers of The Hustle:
Facebook’s animatronic eye
A realistic mechanical eye that can either track the eye movements of a user, or be trained on a real human’s eye movements so as to look realistic.
Why? It looks like it might be used as a way to train, measure, and track the quality of the eye-tracking systems within VR headsets.
(P.S. Not legal advice, but if Zuck-sauce doesn’t want FB painted in a negative light, he should probably consider less ominous-looking patents.)
Google’s crossword generator
Google already knows everything about us, so obviously it has a patent for a crossword generator that can be tailored specifically to users’ interests.
For example, if you’re interested in politics, Google could generate a crossword that helps you test how well you understand what’s going on in the world at the moment.
(In semi-related news: The New York Times launched an AR-enabled crossword puzzle for Instagram).
Spotify — pairing video with music based on emotions
Spotify is looking at recommending music based on the emotions displayed within user-generated video, and vice versa.
So let’s imagine you’ve taken a video on your phone. Under Spotify’s filing, they would extract the latent emotions expressed within the video, and give you back a video clip with appropriate music added to it.
