Speaker 1: I've laid low, right. You know, until now I could be canceled after this. Hello, I'm Robert Sachs. I'm a patent attorney and I've been practicing in the Silicon valley for over 30 years. I've represented many of the companies in the valley that, you know, the names of, and some you don't as they were startups and they didn't get to their IPO today. We're gonna be looking at some interesting patents from Google. I'm gonna be talking about what the technology covers and how this may be useful or not in your life.
Speaker 1: The first patent we're gonna look at is from 2015 and it's for an odor [00:00:30] removing device. Now, this is a very interesting contraption. What we see here on the left side of the screen is a fragrance submitting device. It's a small unit about this big, it's got a display screen on it, as you can see in the front, and it has a chamber, it has a fragrance material in there. And this thing can turn on and off and emit a fragrance because you may smell bad. And that's the key insight of this pattern. You may smell bad and you don't want to smell bad around people. You know, you're on your way. Home from the gym, you're all [00:01:00] stinking and sweaty. And you gotta go from here to your office. And it turns out that someone, you know, in your social is gonna be on your route.
Speaker 1: That's this little guy here in red, that's a defined person. The patent talks about figuring out where you are, figuring out where that person is and giving you an alternate route. So you avoid going anywhere near anybody, you know, while you smell well, you know, I'm not so certain about this technology. If you know, you have this issue, you probably would be wearing deodorant to begin with [00:01:30] and your friends would probably already be tolerant of you. What kind of world is it? We live in that. We're so worried about what we smell like, that we're willing to offend other people that we don't know, but not willing to offend the people we know and care about. This seems something out of black mirror. I don't know about you, but I don't think this one is gonna make it to market.
Speaker 1: As you may know, Google spun off Waymo to develop autonomous vehicles. One of the issues with autonomous vehicles is without a driver, they're sometimes [00:02:00] gonna possibly hit somebody. And what are you gonna do about that? Google came up with a very interesting solution and that's basically what you could call sticky car adhesive, vehicle front end for mitigation of secondary pedestrian impact. The problem being is that when a car hits a person, the person bounces off and hits something else. So let's not have them bounce off. What we're gonna do is we're gonna have a sticky layer. This is some adhesives on the front end of the car. So the patent shows these, this front end, the [00:02:30] car, those little dots are some adhesive material, and thankfully that's not exposed. You don't see that adhesive material it's behind a coating. What? Google calls an eggshell light coating.
Speaker 1: Okay. So you've got this eggshell light coating on the car that is meant to be instantaneously breakable. So when the car hits a person, the coating is broken, exposing the layer to adhere the colliding object upon that initial. So basically you're gonna stick to the cough so you don't go flying off. Okay. [00:03:00] That's a little bit odd. I think there's some serious problems with that. First of all, if this layer is so instantaneously breakable, it's gonna break all the time, right? You're gonna bump into something. You're gonna break it. I can imagine kids walking down the streets, looking at people's hoods and slapping cats and dogs and sneakers on there. So stuff is gonna get on there all the time. It's gonna be really expensive. And then what happens when you actually are hit by this? Are you now stuck here? Do you have to take off of your clothes to get off of this car? I don't know. Doesn't seem like a very practical [00:03:30] solution. And again, something that's just gonna make repairing cars all the more expensive. I wouldn't wanna be stuck on anybody's hood. I rather just go flying off. Thank you. This is an interesting technology. Yeah, not so much.
Speaker 1: Now we're gonna look at some more car related safety technology. And again, I think this reflects a certain lack of understanding about what people are looking for in a car here. What we have is reducing the surface rigidity of a vehicle. So now we actually have an illustration [00:04:00] of a car. It looks like a car, but you can see the top section here is the view of the bumper. It's this protruding section and behind it are cables or some kind of tension elements on the top one. You've got a curve surface and you've got these cables and winches and the cables and the winters work together. And they can change the shape of that service and they could make it less rigid under impact collision. On the bottom one, we have a corrugated bumper, same idea. When the car senses an impact, it will reduce the tension [00:04:30] in those tension members.
Speaker 1: So the rigidity of that portion of the vehicle is reduced. What you could call soft car car, slams into something. The car detects that there's a collision and makes it softer, reduces the rigidity of that. Now that may work, boy, it's gonna make for some bulky, ugly looking cars, just the additional mass and weight from this, that alone is gonna undermine the whole utility of it. A heavier car is the more energy it has when it hits something. So [00:05:00] you may make the car softer, but now it's a heavier car. So it's gonna do as much damage as it did before. So it doesn't really pan out. I don't think this is one's coming to market.
Speaker 1: One of the truths of our times is that a service is free. It means you are the product. Google has taken this to the next level in a smart home system. What they call privacy aware, personalized content for smart home. And the idea is this you're in your house. You have books and media and other [00:05:30] things lying around. You've got a camera system and that camera system is observing what you're doing. So when you pick up a book, it sees that you picked up a book and it can scan the title of that book, for example, or a magazine that you're reading or something that's on television. And it will train a neural network to learn your interactions between that type of media and how you consume it. So what time of day, where you are, what room you're in, all of the content that you interact goes in a neural network to learn your behaviors as time [00:06:00] goes on, that thing is smart. And it determines where you are in your house, looks at the content that you have near you, and then makes recommendations. So what we see here in this illustration is it says, I noticed you have a copy of the godfather by your bed. The movie based on this novel is showing tonight on channel. What have you coming
Speaker 2: To my house that I cannot do?
Speaker 1: This is smart advertising. And the idea is it selects that content without communicating that information [00:06:30] to a content server in a distant network, the patent is full of examples of advertising, how the system could detect, for example, you're playing guitar. And so it shows you an advertisement for guitar on the television or that you are interested in basketball, cuz you're reading a basketball magazine and shows you an advertisement for basketball camp. This is all about monetizing, what people are doing in their personal lives. And that it's privacy aware because it doesn't transmit the OCR information [00:07:00] about what it has seen to a network offsite. So it all lives locally on your house, but what the patent doesn't address. And I think this is of concern is what happens to the information about your actual behaviors. It has to send that information somewhere, particularly to be able to promote your advertising information. And there's nothing in the patent that says that this information about your behaviors is not transmitted. For example, to third parties, to people who are advertising your content to you. So yes, it's privacy aware in one side, it doesn't send out the [00:07:30] behaviors themselves that neural network has learned, but it doesn't really seem to protect the privacy of what you're actually doing and how that behavior is gonna be used by third party advertisers. That's not privacy protection in my mind.
Speaker 1: The last patent we're gonna look at from Google is a medical technology patent. I think this is the most interesting one and has the most potential for really benefiting people in the future. Google calls, this interocular device, I would call this active eye. What you see here in yellow is a [00:08:00] part of the lens capsule. That's the part of your eye where actually has the lens and inside that's a fluid filled sack. You could say the fluid is removed and a polymeric soft material is placed in there along with an active device and active lens and that polymeric material, then bonds the lens to the inside of the lens capsule. There's a sensor that detects when you are attempting to focus, that's called accommodation. And so that bonds together with the active lens. And then there's a [00:08:30] controller that detects when you are trying to focus and then will adjust the lens to do the focusing for you. So you can think of this as a it's an active eye or a bionic eye. Now this is very interesting technology. It can solve a lot of problems for people who are nearsighted, who have lost their vision, who have cataracts, all sorts of eye problems can be remedied by this technology that said it also opens up the prospect of our old friend GORT. Maybe he had that.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: [00:09:00] It certainly seems to make us a little bit closer to our robot overlords. Thank you for watching experts react. If you like the content, please subscribe to C net's YouTube channels. If you have an opinion and I am sure you do leave them in the comments below. Thanks for watching.
