Category: Feasible inventions

These days businesses often need to negotiate deals with companies on the other side of the world.

Instant messaging can provide a limited substitute for face-to-face meetings. The absence of social cues makes it harder to exert undue pressure and may actually enable fuller and clearer discussion.

One of the standard difficulties of negotiating is that of holding a lot of information in the minds of the parties at once. This is expecially true if they are intent upon injecting new bargaining chips during the process. Every book on negotiation technique says “get all the issues that need to be discussed written down and agreed beforehand”. Of course that never happens because the to and fro of bargaining will itself throw up new variables.

Today’s invention is a simple graphical tool which allows every active variable to be shown in realtime on a bar chart to all negotiatiors. This chart indicates the current numerical position of both sides (and could be used to show the positions of more than two negotiating parties).

This limits cognitive overload and the tendency to switch to ‘gut feel’ which often results when the details blur. When one side decides to change its position (by conceding on some things and demanding more in other areas) this can be achieved by moving sliders.

Users of the system could arrange for variables to be displayed in order of the priority which they have assigned them. A deal would be shown when the red line and the blue line become coincident.

A more advanced version of this would incorporate models of how a dealer would require his sliders to interact. The ultimate system would also model how to react in the event of various moves by the opposition.

We hear a lot about parents who are either neglectful or overprotective of their children. It can be quite hard to equip young people to manage the risks they encounter. They have no experience and just giving them abstract rules like not to talk to strangers may not mean anything when they are offered a lift by a nice lady who looks like their auntie.

The adult world is now full of software tools to help us control risk and make better decisions -mostly aimed at safeguarding money. Similarly, there is huge interest in helping soldiers protect themselves on the battlefield by the use of eg virtual reality simulators.

Today’s invention is simply to populate a simulated world with potential risks, so that kids can learn about road crossings, paedophiles, drug pushers, being bullied, dangerous games, peer pressure etc. I’d imagine a number of age-related games supplied to schools. They needn’t be fully immersive VR programs: children get immersed easily enough, if the content is engaging.

A semi-realistic, games-like environment would still work and there need be no simulated horrific consequences of making a wrong decision. The simulation could be made to stop when one has occurred, and some form of corrective tuition delivered, either by a teacher or via another simulation.

It might cost £500,000 to build such tool, (or adapt an existing one) but think of the value of allowing every child at school to learn some effective personal risk management.

No matter how much council tax I have to pay (don’t even go there), my family’s rubbish output each week always seems substantially greater than the volume of our one, large wheelie bin.

To get slightly better value from our sleepy friends at the town hall and also lessen the problem of ‘side waste’ being strewn down the street by the local dog pack, I propose a rubbish compression device as today’s invention.

The wheelie bin lid would be reinforced with a patch of chequerplate, bolted to the top. A similar patch would be applied to the front lip of the bin body. Between these two plates a simple screw mechanism would be fitted, so that it would normally hang, out of the way, down the front of the bin.

Each time an item is inserted in the bin, the lid would be brought down on top, the screw device flipped up to engage with the lid’s plate and a large starting handle used to turn the screw, thus compressing the bin’s contents to a density approaching that of Uranium.

There’s been some small controversy lately about whether or not image search results should be displayed with data automatically attached, or only when the image is rolled over.

I’m not satisfied by either approach, since you still have to scan each image sequentially across and down the page to find anything vaguely resembling what you may be looking for -unless you are looking for e.g. ‘anything yellow,’ in which case you should perhaps have your internet licence revoked.

People forget that they aren’t able to perceive the entire visual field simultaneously at high resolution, because they usually have the freedom to make eye and head movements of the type that conventional image search demands -think about scanning a team photograph for the face of your favourite nephew: you can only do it by a serial scan process, not all at once.

Today’s invention makes use of this fact about perception, together with another one. We can identify images easily in around 150 ms. I therefore suggest that image search results be displayed one at a time, every 200 ms -as in a slide show. When you spot an image that is of interest, simply click on it to stop the process for a more detailed look.

This would enable reliable inspection of 300 images per minute: much faster than can be achieved when including the additional time taken to scan between them arrayed on a page. It would also allow images to appear at greater resolution than in their present, postage-stamp size.

(In fact, the rate of inspection could probably be increased further, without actually losing much recognition capability).

I’m looking forward to the day when a single, adaptive camera lens will be smart enough to take whatever image I need (that day is coming, albeit slowly. See this for example).

Until then, changing lenses is still going to be a painful process in which you run the risk of coating your sensor array with dust particulates which are invisible -until your photos are viewed on a big screen.

So, today’s invention is to adapt the idea behind the old-fashioned spherical/rotary lens changer on microscopes, for retro-fit use on digital SLR’s. This allows lenses to be substituted, whilst keeping the instrument’s interior pristine.

No-one wants to have to carry all their lenses on the camera though.

The invention would therefore have to be a bayonet-fit device, attached once to the camera body (in as near sterile conditions as possible). The simplest form would resemble a linearly sliding, rectangular ‘sluice gate’ or guillotine with two apertures – of the type used in old slide projectors (shown from above, in red).

A substitute lens can be slotted into one side of the gate, whilst still wearing its own cap on the camera-facing end. The gate can then be slid across the camera body until the new lens locks into place. At no point is the camera body left open to the atmosphere. If you were being ultra careful, the gate movement itself might be used to create a small, transient internal overpressure, making life even harder for any specks determined to get inside.

The camera-facing caps on the lenses could be made to slide radially off and on, driven by the motion of the gate itself, without ever exposing the internals of your expensive optics.

Almost every new digital camera now has an image stabilisation option to allow the user to take handheld shots, with a giant telephoto lens, more or less in the dark. These seem to work based on tiny gyroscopes that react against camera motion by sending a signal, via a servomotor, to move the sensor plane in the opposite direction. If I’d suggested that level of complexity, people might well have quibbled.

One possible approach is to use postprocessing (deconvolution) techniques (if you know the path taken, you can mathematically ‘retrace the steps’ of the camera’s motion and subtract their effect at each point). But if you aren’t taking pictures of eg stars, often the path of the motion is unknown.

So today’s invention is an alternative process which makes use of the fact that multiple digital shots are free. Even my Canon A700 can take about 5, 640×480 shots per second, at 1/400 sec (with flash disabled).

-Take a sequence of such short-exposure images (each of which will look almost uniformly black)
-Locate the peak of intensity in each, using a very simple in-camera program
-Align the peaks and add the images together, so as to create a bright image, without motion blur

(If you were prepared to live with lower-resolution images, you could of course just shoot video, rather than multiple timed exposures).

Automated number plate recognition systems have always been expensive to install, temperamental to commission and sensitive to any slight differences in font between the plates of neighbouring nations.

Now, technology exists to overcome all these difficulties. Today’s invention is a way to provide on-board ANPR for all cars that are fitted with satnav devices. Each would carry a cheap webcam (or two) which would look at surrounding plates and decide, using software running on a small in-car computer, whether any of these plates was one currently being targetted by security forces.

On finding such a plate, the system would transmit its location (and possibly also its current speed).

For more information on how this can be achieved today, please contact me via pra@patrickandrews.com

As digital cameras get smaller, so the chances of them being left behind in restaurants or in taxis tend to increase. Although the hardware will soon be almost disposable, the images on board can still be very valuable.

I’m optimistic enough to still think that, in the event of me forgetting some possession, someone might actually try to return it to me. I discovered recently, however, that there is no easy way to store my contact details in my new camera -short of carving my email address into the rather attractive steel casing.

Today’s invention is therefore to equip new digital cameras (those without keypads, anyway) with the ability to store one, read-only image. This could be of eg a business card or other contact information stored on the day of purchase and remaining as startup image forever. You might even choose to include details about a reward for the safe return of your stuff.

When you look at some image (whether an old master or some pastoral scene on your desktop) it usually looks flat and obviously unreal. That is partly because of that fact that when viewing with both eyes, the brain can easily detect that some picture of a 3-D scene is just 2-D.

One way to get more from such images is to view them, using one eye, through a stationary frame. Often an artist or photographer will have cleverly composed their image so as to contain many ‘monocular depth cues‘ -elements like texture which blurs as it ‘recedes’ into the image. When the image is seen using only one eye, these cues get a chance to be interpreted strongly by the brain and everything can seem much more realistic and 3-D.

Today’s invention is therefore an ultra-cheap and crude alternative to 3-D displays. It consists of a simple mechanical ‘headset’ that allows someone to sit with their head very still relative to a screen whilst they view images through a frame which is closer to the user than to the screen itself. One eye would be blanked off, although this could perhaps be allowed to alternate every few hours to minimise fatigue.

Certain games, works of art and tv shows might even be designed to incorporate lots more depth cues to enhance this effect and reduce the need for customer purchases of electronic display hardware.

“Be sure the roll is on the outside”… easy enough to say in the small print of the multilingual condom instruction manual, but under normal (ie urgent) circumstances, determining which is the inside and outside of a condom can be quite a challenge.

Today’s invention is therefore simply to place a contraceptive sheath in its sealed foil packaging so that eg the side of the packet which should be facing the male’s torso is always of one colour.

This is probably already happening, all we need is to be told that we can rely on it.