19 ms·

Microsoft buys AR headset patents for $100-150M – report

95 points by Aoyagi 13y ago

ChuckMcM 13y ago
That is interesting, I wonder what patents or provisionals CastAR has in the pipeline.
higherpurpose 13y ago
I think AR is at least 10 years behind VR in terms of mainstream adoption or "usefulness". VR is almost there (I think with 4k resolution, it will be) to provide incredible advantages over what we have now. AR on the other hand will most likely be mainly a gimmick for the next 10 years or so, even if they can show some pretty cool demos initially. Take Microsoft's Illumiroom for example which is "sort of AR". The immersion is much greater in VR than what Illumiroom offers, and I'd much rather be "present" in a VR world, than see some light show on my walls, at much poorer quality and much lower realism.
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  I've never been in an illumiroom, but I have been in a CAVE like environment with 3d projected walls. Pressing a button on the motion tracked handset and seeing (and hearing) a lightsabre blade come out of it was by far the coolest technology mediated experience I've had. I've got a Rift, but I don't think anything it offers will be as good as that.
tzaman 13y ago
Microsoft, as usual, following other's footsteps. Kinda sad since they used to lead the game.
- gum_ina_package 13y ago
  As mentioned earlier on HN, deals like these don't just happen overnight. They literally are the result of months (sometimes years) of planning, analysis, and strategy. To think that MS is just going to drop $100 mil on AR technology because Facebook did (are they really even competitors, I mean come on...) is very naïve.
  - mavdi 13y ago
    Obviously companies like Microsoft have their own spies in Facebook and Google and vice versa, so yeah this might well be a response to Facebook buying Oculus.
- jelloPuddin 13y ago
  The parents were reassigned to Microsoft on January 17th. Maybe Facebook is the copy cat.
- curiousDog 13y ago
  Just because they bought a few patents doesn't mean they're following. FWIW, MSR has done some pioneering work here and they showcased early prototypes a while back. I wouldn't be surprised ms has had one in the works for a while
- Shorel 13y ago
  > Kinda sad since they used to lead the game. May be when they first made their Basic interpreter. And Word for Windows. But everything else was an acquisition or a clone. DOS bought, Windows cloned from Xerox and Mac, Excel cloned from Lotus-123, FoxPro bought, XBOX cloned from playstation, Internet Explorer bought.
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    Easy to say 'cloned' when you mean 'built'. There's a lot of differences between those products. If an entrepreneur came out with them it'd be called innovation, not cloning.
  - kenjackson 13y ago
    And iPhone closed from the Palm. And the iPod cloned from the Archos Rockbox. And Linux of course cloned from Unix. And the Mac cloned from Xerox. And the iPad cloned from tablet PCs. And the PlayStation cloned from Nintendo. Nintendo cloned from Atari 2600. Atari 2600 cloned from board games. BTW, Word cloned from Word Perfect. BASIC interpreter cloned from all the previous BASIC interpreters that existed. Being first or "leading" don't matter. It's about execution and a bit of luck. Look at Android. It sure as heck wasn't first, but they executed. Windows wasn't first, but they executed.
  - yaakov34 13y ago
    Would you like to explain how e.g. Excel is a clone of 123, but 123 is not a clone of Visicalc? I mean, everything ever done with digital computers is an extension of Charles Babbage's work on the difference engine, which was cloned from Pascal's calculator of the 1640s, maybe with a couple of enhancements here and there. See how you sound?
  - gagaga 13y ago
    And the iPhone was a clone of Windows Mobile?
- itg 13y ago
  To be fair, Google wasn't the first at search, email, or smartphones but they do very well in each of those areas.
gum_ina_package 13y ago
Very interesting development. Personally I don't see AR being anywhere close to VR in terms of usefulness, polish, and mass market appeal. VR obviously is going to be a major player in the gaming/entertainment industries, while an AR headset is more of a general use device for everyone. It'll be interesting to see what MS comes out with.
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  AR is potentially much more useful, but VR is much more likely to lead to useful products in the near future. VR is hard, but AR has all the same problems of VR plus a whole bunch more.
  - nealabq 13y ago
    AR will no doubt be helped along by VR tech. But I'd guess mass-market AR will first appear in vehicle and building windows.
    - cinquemb 13y ago
      Some AR is already present in some vehicles. My mother has a "HUD" that reflects off the glass that displays speed, and gas consumption in the direct LOS while driving, but not intrusive enough to distract, mid 2000's car. But if I abstract what you are saying a bit, I would have to agree that AR is going to be an "easier" sell in b2b than b2c, it has been for a while. I think the cross over will happen when consumers are more exposed to the ways businesses leverage it. Here's a scenario I can see before mainstream adoption: Imagine a sales clerk or rep with it as you walk into the store to pull in data from across the web about you from facial recog and be able to automatically point you to where you might be interested, maybe even using google's/microsoft's/facebook's/yelp's/some startup's "intent" api that pulls in your latest queries that may be relevant to the store you just we're identified in. Then some people see such things used, and then want the same capabilities as they navigate their cities around them seeing that it could be useful in their life.
      - 13y ago
jessriedel 13y ago
For those confused by the acronyms: A virtual reality (VR) headset would show the viewer an image completely produced by the device. An augmented reality (AR) headset allows you to see through the glasses at the actual world in front of you, and just projects extra data or graphics onto of this. Think of a heads-up display for a fighter pilot.
- noblethrasher 13y ago
  > Think of a heads-up display for a fighter pilot. Or the HUD in the Iron Man suit.
- AndrewKemendo 13y ago
  As someone who is working on an AR project and has to constantly explain to people WHAT AR is, I find it a tad disheartening that this is the top comment in HN comments. I would have expected that the readership would have been well versed enough that it would have been mid-level. This does serve as a good data point about technology penetration though. Thanks.
nealabq 13y ago
This is more likely a response to Google Glass, not Oculus. I assume Google has built a patent portfolio around Glass. This may even be a defensive move by Microsoft. Still, looks like another tragedy of patent abuse brewing. I wonder about the upcoming patent lawsuits against Oculus. Maybe that's their real reason for embracing FB -- protection.
- SixSigma 13y ago
  Especially considering that MS has a ~1.3% Facebook (preferred) shareholding; that's 32.5 million shares, currently priced at $1.95bn - they won't be attacking FB with a patent suit any time soon. Interestingly the Oculus buyout has also been viewed negatively by the markets, wiping 7% off the share value since the announcement.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    "wiping 7% off the share value since the announcement." I wish everyone would stop citing this figure. Several major tech companies lost about the same amount off their market cap on the same day. Yes, some of that 7% might be attributable to the Oculus acquisition, but most of it was the result of market sentiment that day.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - SixSigma 13y ago
      Shame on me. I hadn't actually looked at the rest of the market data. I came across that figure while researching how many shares Microsoft had in Facebook from a "Related Links" box. Even if I had, I still shouldn't have repeated the speculation of the cause. Maybe the announcement stopped the share value sliding by 14%. I was already aware that one of the great fallacies of market reporting is News Item X caused change in Share Price Y.
- jerknextdoor 13y ago
  I agree that from a quick look it seems much closer to gGlass than Oculus. As much as we give Microsoft crap these days (I run in a *nix crowd), I think this is great for the sake of innovation. I really hope it's not just defensive, because I like the idea of the future happening soon and nothing will bring that on like some healthy competition.
rch 13y ago
I love how the real MS shows up from time to time to remind us that all the 'new openness' and fair play talk is exactly that, and probably always will be.
- gnoway 13y ago
  I tend to agree with the sentiment, but exactly what ill-intent does acquiring patents actually demonstrate?
  - rch 13y ago
    That's a fair question, and maybe I am jumping the gun with this particular set of patents. But my interpretation is in context with other patent licensing news (March 26th, 2014): http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2P1VC20140326?irpc=932 http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2P1VC20140326?irpc... So I was primed to read this as opening a new front in an ongoing, contemporary effort to use patents aggressively. Maybe the downvotes are a clear signal that I'm destined to be proven wrong in this regard. I guess we'll see.
  - nestlequ1k 13y ago
    Let's see, Microsoft is extorting $3.4bil a year off a technology it did absolutely nothing to contribute to (Android). The ill-intent is that they are betting on AR succeeding too so that they can extort money off that.
baby 13y ago
I only thought about this for their Xbox division, until I saw the comments in here. But the idea of glasses that shows you ammo count, health and other infos while your playing. Basically a HUD on your face. is really appealing to me.
fabiofzero 13y ago
It's 2014 and Microsoft keeps on being the "me too" of consumer technology.
nsnick 13y ago
This website breaks mobile safari. The bar at the bottom does not appear when scrolling up.
izzydata 13y ago
I can't wait for AR similar to the show Dennou Coil to become a real. It seems potentially feasible to be a real thing even if at the time the show was made it probably seemed impossible.
rasur 13y ago
Meta are the company to watch in the AR space.
zackmorris 13y ago
Gah, it didn't occur to me that the reason the Oculus sale was so expensive might have been patent-related. VR tech is not all that complicated. I mean really, if protocols like HDMI and Thunderbolt weren't so complex, DRM and patent laden themselves, how hard is it to put an image on two screens and sync it to gyroscopes/ultrasonics/infrareds? This is college-senior-project level complexity. Software patents are such an obvious incumbrance to programmers, but I wonder if we should think about the toll that hardware patents are taking on innovation overall Maybe it’s time to take a stance against all patents. I’m hopeful that rapid prototyping might alleviate some of this because hardware could be open sourced and then people could assemble it themselves. Unfortunately they probably won’t be able to pay someone else to do it. That strikes me as fundamentally wrong and when the law doesn’t fit the public interest, we’ll probably see black market and bootleg manufacturing appear. We need 21st century solutions for intellectual property, when the vast majority of manufacturing is automated and even innovation itself has been augmented by machine learning. Otherwise I see the end of innovation and only the biggest megacorps being able to afford to play.
- chamanbuga 13y ago
  I'm with you on reforming patents. But how do you protects companies from copy cats? iPhone is released and some hardware manufacturer makes the exact same shell running Symbian instead. I'm not talking about copying the OS, but the hardware form factor. They represent a brand image as well.
  - dabrowski 13y ago
    More competition is always good. Also, if iPhone's form factor is actually better, then it would only benefit customers if other companies would adopt it.
    - msherry 13y ago
      Sure, but I if as an inventor can't be guaranteed some protections for my work, for at least some period of time, I'm less likely to produce this better form factor in the first place, which is a net negative for consumers.
gfodor 13y ago
I think the comments in this thread talking about AR and VR as if they are different are misplaced -- AR and VR will converge: http://willsteptoe.com/post/66968953089/ar-rift-part-1 http://willsteptoe.com/post/66968953089/ar-rift-part-1
programminggeek 13y ago
Not surprising. If you had the billions that Microsoft does, you'd invest in patents too. At this point it's the software equivalent of buying out the supply chain like Apple famously does with hardware components.
rikacomet 13y ago
Am I the only one who saw the UPGRADE NOW banner ? despite Adblock?
shmerl 13y ago
MS and patents? A very bad mix.
nestlequ1k 13y ago
How stupid. Microsoft pays a bunch of people who invented a bunch of ideas that are now restricted from being used. What a joke the patent system is. We're paying people to innovate ideas, and prevent any product with those ideas from coming to market. Patent holders should have to pay a substantial tax / fee every year to keep their patents. If these ideas are so valuable, they should be building products and benefiting society with them. Not stuffing them under the mattress and waiting to sue some poor sap who actually wants to ship something.

95 points by Aoyagi 13y ago

That is interesting, I wonder what patents or provisionals CastAR has in the pipeline.

I think AR is at least 10 years behind VR in terms of mainstream adoption or "usefulness". VR is almost there (I think with 4k resolution, it will be) to provide incredible advantages over what we have now. AR on the other hand will most likely be mainly a gimmick for the next 10 years or so, even if they can show some pretty cool demos initially. Take Microsoft's Illumiroom for example which is "sort of AR". The immersion is much greater in VR than what Illumiroom offers, and I'd much rather be "present" in a VR world, than see some light show on my walls, at much poorer quality and much lower realism.

kybernetikos 13y ago
I've never been in an illumiroom, but I have been in a CAVE like environment with 3d projected walls. Pressing a button on the motion tracked handset and seeing (and hearing) a lightsabre blade come out of it was by far the coolest technology mediated experience I've had. I've got a Rift, but I don't think anything it offers will be as good as that.

tzaman 13y ago

Microsoft, as usual, following other's footsteps. Kinda sad since they used to lead the game.

gum_ina_package 13y ago
As mentioned earlier on HN, deals like these don't just happen overnight. They literally are the result of months (sometimes years) of planning, analysis, and strategy. To think that MS is just going to drop $100 mil on AR technology because Facebook did (are they really even competitors, I mean come on...) is very naïve.
- mavdi 13y ago
  Obviously companies like Microsoft have their own spies in Facebook and Google and vice versa, so yeah this might well be a response to Facebook buying Oculus.
jelloPuddin 13y ago
The parents were reassigned to Microsoft on January 17th. Maybe Facebook is the copy cat.
curiousDog 13y ago
Just because they bought a few patents doesn't mean they're following. FWIW, MSR has done some pioneering work here and they showcased early prototypes a while back. I wouldn't be surprised ms has had one in the works for a while
Shorel 13y ago
> Kinda sad since they used to lead the game. May be when they first made their Basic interpreter. And Word for Windows. But everything else was an acquisition or a clone. DOS bought, Windows cloned from Xerox and Mac, Excel cloned from Lotus-123, FoxPro bought, XBOX cloned from playstation, Internet Explorer bought.
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Easy to say 'cloned' when you mean 'built'. There's a lot of differences between those products. If an entrepreneur came out with them it'd be called innovation, not cloning.
- kenjackson 13y ago
  And iPhone closed from the Palm. And the iPod cloned from the Archos Rockbox. And Linux of course cloned from Unix. And the Mac cloned from Xerox. And the iPad cloned from tablet PCs. And the PlayStation cloned from Nintendo. Nintendo cloned from Atari 2600. Atari 2600 cloned from board games. BTW, Word cloned from Word Perfect. BASIC interpreter cloned from all the previous BASIC interpreters that existed. Being first or "leading" don't matter. It's about execution and a bit of luck. Look at Android. It sure as heck wasn't first, but they executed. Windows wasn't first, but they executed.
- yaakov34 13y ago
  Would you like to explain how e.g. Excel is a clone of 123, but 123 is not a clone of Visicalc? I mean, everything ever done with digital computers is an extension of Charles Babbage's work on the difference engine, which was cloned from Pascal's calculator of the 1640s, maybe with a couple of enhancements here and there. See how you sound?
- gagaga 13y ago
  And the iPhone was a clone of Windows Mobile?
itg 13y ago
To be fair, Google wasn't the first at search, email, or smartphones but they do very well in each of those areas.

gum_ina_package 13y ago

Very interesting development. Personally I don't see AR being anywhere close to VR in terms of usefulness, polish, and mass market appeal. VR obviously is going to be a major player in the gaming/entertainment industries, while an AR headset is more of a general use device for everyone. It'll be interesting to see what MS comes out with.

kybernetikos 13y ago
AR is potentially much more useful, but VR is much more likely to lead to useful products in the near future. VR is hard, but AR has all the same problems of VR plus a whole bunch more.
- nealabq 13y ago
  AR will no doubt be helped along by VR tech. But I'd guess mass-market AR will first appear in vehicle and building windows.
  - cinquemb 13y ago
    Some AR is already present in some vehicles. My mother has a "HUD" that reflects off the glass that displays speed, and gas consumption in the direct LOS while driving, but not intrusive enough to distract, mid 2000's car. But if I abstract what you are saying a bit, I would have to agree that AR is going to be an "easier" sell in b2b than b2c, it has been for a while. I think the cross over will happen when consumers are more exposed to the ways businesses leverage it. Here's a scenario I can see before mainstream adoption: Imagine a sales clerk or rep with it as you walk into the store to pull in data from across the web about you from facial recog and be able to automatically point you to where you might be interested, maybe even using google's/microsoft's/facebook's/yelp's/some startup's "intent" api that pulls in your latest queries that may be relevant to the store you just we're identified in. Then some people see such things used, and then want the same capabilities as they navigate their cities around them seeing that it could be useful in their life.
    - 13y ago

jessriedel 13y ago

For those confused by the acronyms: A virtual reality (VR) headset would show the viewer an image completely produced by the device. An augmented reality (AR) headset allows you to see through the glasses at the actual world in front of you, and just projects extra data or graphics onto of this. Think of a heads-up display for a fighter pilot.

noblethrasher 13y ago
> Think of a heads-up display for a fighter pilot. Or the HUD in the Iron Man suit.
AndrewKemendo 13y ago
As someone who is working on an AR project and has to constantly explain to people WHAT AR is, I find it a tad disheartening that this is the top comment in HN comments. I would have expected that the readership would have been well versed enough that it would have been mid-level. This does serve as a good data point about technology penetration though. Thanks.

nealabq 13y ago

This is more likely a response to Google Glass, not Oculus. I assume Google has built a patent portfolio around Glass. This may even be a defensive move by Microsoft. Still, looks like another tragedy of patent abuse brewing. I wonder about the upcoming patent lawsuits against Oculus. Maybe that's their real reason for embracing FB -- protection.

SixSigma 13y ago
Especially considering that MS has a ~1.3% Facebook (preferred) shareholding; that's 32.5 million shares, currently priced at $1.95bn - they won't be attacking FB with a patent suit any time soon. Interestingly the Oculus buyout has also been viewed negatively by the markets, wiping 7% off the share value since the announcement.
- malandrew 13y ago
  "wiping 7% off the share value since the announcement." I wish everyone would stop citing this figure. Several major tech companies lost about the same amount off their market cap on the same day. Yes, some of that 7% might be attributable to the Oculus acquisition, but most of it was the result of market sentiment that day.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - SixSigma 13y ago
    Shame on me. I hadn't actually looked at the rest of the market data. I came across that figure while researching how many shares Microsoft had in Facebook from a "Related Links" box. Even if I had, I still shouldn't have repeated the speculation of the cause. Maybe the announcement stopped the share value sliding by 14%. I was already aware that one of the great fallacies of market reporting is News Item X caused change in Share Price Y.
jerknextdoor 13y ago
I agree that from a quick look it seems much closer to gGlass than Oculus. As much as we give Microsoft crap these days (I run in a *nix crowd), I think this is great for the sake of innovation. I really hope it's not just defensive, because I like the idea of the future happening soon and nothing will bring that on like some healthy competition.

rch 13y ago

I love how the real MS shows up from time to time to remind us that all the 'new openness' and fair play talk is exactly that, and probably always will be.

gnoway 13y ago
I tend to agree with the sentiment, but exactly what ill-intent does acquiring patents actually demonstrate?
- rch 13y ago
  That's a fair question, and maybe I am jumping the gun with this particular set of patents. But my interpretation is in context with other patent licensing news (March 26th, 2014): http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2P1VC20140326?irpc=932 http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2P1VC20140326?irpc... So I was primed to read this as opening a new front in an ongoing, contemporary effort to use patents aggressively. Maybe the downvotes are a clear signal that I'm destined to be proven wrong in this regard. I guess we'll see.
- nestlequ1k 13y ago
  Let's see, Microsoft is extorting $3.4bil a year off a technology it did absolutely nothing to contribute to (Android). The ill-intent is that they are betting on AR succeeding too so that they can extort money off that.

baby 13y ago

I only thought about this for their Xbox division, until I saw the comments in here. But the idea of glasses that shows you ammo count, health and other infos while your playing. Basically a HUD on your face. is really appealing to me.

fabiofzero 13y ago

It's 2014 and Microsoft keeps on being the "me too" of consumer technology.

nsnick 13y ago

This website breaks mobile safari. The bar at the bottom does not appear when scrolling up.

izzydata 13y ago

I can't wait for AR similar to the show Dennou Coil to become a real. It seems potentially feasible to be a real thing even if at the time the show was made it probably seemed impossible.

rasur 13y ago

Meta are the company to watch in the AR space.

zackmorris 13y ago

Gah, it didn't occur to me that the reason the Oculus sale was so expensive might have been patent-related. VR tech is not all that complicated. I mean really, if protocols like HDMI and Thunderbolt weren't so complex, DRM and patent laden themselves, how hard is it to put an image on two screens and sync it to gyroscopes/ultrasonics/infrareds? This is college-senior-project level complexity. Software patents are such an obvious incumbrance to programmers, but I wonder if we should think about the toll that hardware patents are taking on innovation overall Maybe it’s time to take a stance against all patents. I’m hopeful that rapid prototyping might alleviate some of this because hardware could be open sourced and then people could assemble it themselves. Unfortunately they probably won’t be able to pay someone else to do it. That strikes me as fundamentally wrong and when the law doesn’t fit the public interest, we’ll probably see black market and bootleg manufacturing appear. We need 21st century solutions for intellectual property, when the vast majority of manufacturing is automated and even innovation itself has been augmented by machine learning. Otherwise I see the end of innovation and only the biggest megacorps being able to afford to play.

chamanbuga 13y ago
I'm with you on reforming patents. But how do you protects companies from copy cats? iPhone is released and some hardware manufacturer makes the exact same shell running Symbian instead. I'm not talking about copying the OS, but the hardware form factor. They represent a brand image as well.
- dabrowski 13y ago
  More competition is always good. Also, if iPhone's form factor is actually better, then it would only benefit customers if other companies would adopt it.
  - msherry 13y ago
    Sure, but I if as an inventor can't be guaranteed some protections for my work, for at least some period of time, I'm less likely to produce this better form factor in the first place, which is a net negative for consumers.

gfodor 13y ago

I think the comments in this thread talking about AR and VR as if they are different are misplaced -- AR and VR will converge: http://willsteptoe.com/post/66968953089/ar-rift-part-1 http://willsteptoe.com/post/66968953089/ar-rift-part-1

programminggeek 13y ago

Not surprising. If you had the billions that Microsoft does, you'd invest in patents too. At this point it's the software equivalent of buying out the supply chain like Apple famously does with hardware components.

rikacomet 13y ago

Am I the only one who saw the UPGRADE NOW banner ? despite Adblock?

shmerl 13y ago

MS and patents? A very bad mix.

nestlequ1k 13y ago

How stupid. Microsoft pays a bunch of people who invented a bunch of ideas that are now restricted from being used. What a joke the patent system is. We're paying people to innovate ideas, and prevent any product with those ideas from coming to market. Patent holders should have to pay a substantial tax / fee every year to keep their patents. If these ideas are so valuable, they should be building products and benefiting society with them. Not stuffing them under the mattress and waiting to sue some poor sap who actually wants to ship something.