This is one odd patent filing. We should save it for April fools as it unlike any other we have seen filed by Canon. JP 2023-154894. Published on October 20, 2023 patent filing 2023-154894 describes several devices types that record not only what the user is saying, but records various biometric information to support audio recording to capture the audio and transcribe what was said for the wearer of the device.
The first embodiment appears to be a smart pair of eye glasses, which we have seem other companies try and fail to gain traction with. The necklace is a strange one as is the ring.
It's not clear from the patent which market canon is aiming these devices at, but they are definitely thinking out of the box. Some on the team have suggested they are designed for the hearing impaired, for medical assisted devices, but the patent spells out how they record the wearer's voice, transcribe the wearer's audio, not any other parties.
Some patent artefacts detect lip movement to isolate the wearer's lip movement. This triggers the device to record the audio stream, focusing just on what the wearer is speaking. It will then export the audio, a transcription or both.
A microphone that focuses on a single actor when the device can replicate any prop to fit into any movies or show would make a lot of sense if it could produce hi-fidelity audio would make sense, but the patent doesn't address this scenario or mention the fidelity of the audio which has us believing this is not the purpose either. This is one of those rare patents where we are stumped. We only suggest this the only divisions that would benefit from this are the cinema or stills camera market.
The patent logic flow requires Google Translate to isolate the English translation. If you're up to it, give it a read and let us know what you think. Perhaps you will detect something we did not.
We aren't the only ones confused by this patent. The Ordinary Filmmaker recent posted a video and we suspect others will be commenting on this soon. We'll post links to their content once published.
The New Camera wrote about published a story about canon working on smart glasses in 2022, but references a different patent. The referenced patent describes capturing images, not audio.
