Microsoft's first patent touching on smart fabrics for future smart gloves surfaced back in November 2019. Then last week the US Patent & Trademark Office published a second patent application from Microsoft relating to smart gloves having flexible regions of varying stiffnesses for accommodating both wearability and input/output device performance.
Many wearable devices, such as head-mounted devices and wrist-mounted devices, include a rigid body that houses electronic components such as input and output devices. However, some wearable devices may be designed to position input and/or output devices at flexible locations of the devices.
As an example, a wearable device in the form of an electronically functional textile glove may include one or more haptic output devices to provide vibrational outputs at locations along fingers of the glove, the back of the hand, and/or palm, and/or may include motion-restricting mechanisms (e.g. electrostatic clutches, electrorheological devices, magnetorheological devices, mechanical motion restriction devices, etc.) to apply pulling, pushing, and/or locking forces to a user's fingers.
Yet attaching such devices to flexible portions of a wearable device may pose challenges. For example, mounting a haptic or other mechanical device to a flexible portion of a wearable device may result in output energy (e.g. vibrational energy, mechanical motion, etc.) of the device being attenuated by the flexible glove, thereby dampening an effect of the output device as perceived by a user.
Microsoft's invention relates to a wearable device having regions of varying stiffnesses for accommodating both the mounting of an input and/or output device and wearability.
When included, an input subsystem may comprise or interface with one or more user-input devices such as a keyboard, mouse, touch screen, or game controller.
In some embodiments, the input subsystem may comprise or interface with selected natural user input (NUI) componentry. Such componentry may be integrated or peripheral, and the transduction and/or processing of input actions may be handled on- or off-board.
Example NUI componentry may include a microphone for speech and/or voice recognition; an infrared, color, stereoscopic, and/or depth camera for machine vision and/or gesture recognition; a head tracker, eye tracker, accelerometer, and/or gyroscope for motion detection and/or intent recognition; as well as electric-field sensing componentry for assessing brain activity.
Microsoft's patent FIGS. 1A and 1B show a top view and a side view of an example wearable device #100 in the form of a glove that has at least a first region #102 of flexible material having a lesser stiffness and a second region #104 of flexible material having a greater stiffness.
The flexible material of each region may comprise a textile, such as a knitted fabric, woven fabric, or non-woven fabric. The flexible material of the second region #104 may comprise a reinforced portion of the same material as the first region, and/or may comprise a different material (e.g. different yarn density, different yarn materials, different weave/knit pattern, etc.).
Microsoft's patent FIGS. 2-5 below show example shapes of reinforcing structures that can be integrated with a textile used to form a glove device, or with a glove device formed from a textile, to stiffen selected regions of the glove device. The depicted structures may be formed via a polymer integrated into the textile of the glove device, and/or from a stiffer textile structure than used in other portions of the device. Each structure is shown in a flattened configuration separate from the glove device for clarity. First, FIG. 2 shows an example structure 200 that may be integrated with a finger portion of a glove to stiffen selected regions of the glove.
Microsoft's patent FIG. 3 shows an example stiffening structure #300 similar to structure #200, but with sub-regions of different stiffnesses.
In patent FIGS. 4 and 5 we're able to see stiffening structures #400 and #500 that may be incorporated into a textile for a wearable device, such as along a finger of a glove device.
In these examples, each structure comprises a polymer quantity gradient along a direction. First regarding FIG. 4, the stiffening structure #400 comprises small circular polymer structures that are larger in diameter at one end #402 and decrease in size along a direction toward the opposite end #404.
Referring next to FIG. 5, the stiffening structure #500 comprises a consistent width along its length, but has a thicker amount of the polymer at one end #502, and decreases in thickness along a direction toward the opposite end #504.
In each of these examples, the stiffening structure may provide a greater amount of stiffness where there is a greater quantity of polymer, and a lesser amount of stiffness where there is a lesser quantity of polymer.
Microsoft's patent that was published last week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was originally filed back in Q3 2018.
For the record, both Samsung (2014) and Sony (2016) have patents on record for future smart gloves relating to games and beyond.
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