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How is "pinching", or even a camera tracking your eye movements, obvious? Especially "pinching" - give me one example of an object that you can you can increase in size or scale through the pinching motion.

blue-tack! :-)

It is obvious to me. I'm talking about the idea, not the implementation. It is hard to code this idea in software and I'm certainly not capable of it. But their code is their copyright. The idea is a patent. Eye tracking software is obvious, many people have been trying to do it since 20 or 30 years. It is hard to translate in computer code, but the idea is widely documented in the net and is obvious to several people who work in the accessibility area. When you see someone who has sclerosis and who can't move any part of his body but the eye, and you are working in the software industry, your first idea is: "we should track the eye and translate it into mouse movement". To me and to several people this is obvious. Pinching is equaly obvious to me and to several people.

The hard part is the actual implementation. And maybe that would be patentable, but not a patent like 'using artificial neural network and haar-like features, we could track eye movements', this is the obvious way to do it, but it is hard. An inovative way would maybe be patentable, but seriously, 'pinching', you've got to be kidding! This is far from Einstein discoveries.

Edited 2009-01-22 16:04 UTC

your statment is correct that in the US a patent must be "non-obvious"

your example however was a poor one as it is not 'obvious' to track your eyes to move a pointer

a better example would be along the lines of a patent 'for using a pencil to write'

No you couldn't. Ideas are not patentable, implementations are.

I could patent the implementation of a pointing device using an eye tracker, even though many peope are working on it.

Edited 2009-01-22 16:16 UTC

I have to disagree,

you need to be able to explain to others how to make and use the invention so that they could replicate the invention after simply reading your description of the invention in a patent application. You do not need to have a prototype

No you couldn't. Ideas are not patentable, implementations are. "

Not really, I think all you need is a drawing. It may actually be impossible to make though. You can show a picture or drawing of some ultrathin (hair width) fishing pole so that fish can't see you trying to cast, but it may not actually be feasable to make. Something that only exists on paper is an idea in my opinion.

"eye tracker as pointing device" isn't the idea, I think he is just sumarizing... The idea is more like (and I know his idea cuz it's obvious)

Take a picture of face/eyes while staring at dot in center. Take a picture of face/eyes staring at dot in upper left. Compare pictures, calibrate. From now on when picture looks like second picture move arrow to upper left. blah blah blah I can pretend this is a working implementation, but the reality is that it's harder to actually make work in real life. For real life you don't have enough resolution to do regular computer work, you would need a special menu or smart cursor that jumped to hotspots like clickable buttons, pre-specified icons etc.

At least now that I've said it in public any eye tracking software based on taking pictures of your face isn't patentable right.... well no, cuz the patent office dude will not be trawling OSNEWS for prior art. From the looks of what I've seen, they don't search for anything, just stamp OK and let the courts and defendants do the work.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=cn85AAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoo...

man, that's a spooky place to trawl google.com/patents

(p.s. I believe the degree of obviousness reguarding patents is not necessarily v.s. the general public, but to another professional in a similar field.)

-Bounty (as always IANAL)