This design patent shows off a camera mounted on a bracelet. It doesn’t tell us anything about the camera beyond showing off the design of the camera. I looked for profiles of the inventors listed on the patent, and I think the ones I found maybe the ones involved in the creation of this design (though I can’t be completely certain). There does look like there is some hardware design involving cameras among the skills in the profiles I found. We will have to keep our eyes open for news of a camera like this potentially made by people building things like the cameras built for off-street views of Street Views. It’s possible that this camera could be a way of indexing the world, like street-view cameras, are, rather than a consumer product.
Among the named inventors is:
- A Staff Optical Engineer at Google
- An Engineering Leader and Former Google Principal Engineer now at Uber, who worked on Geographic Maps and indoor maps at Google
- A System Design/Systems engineer who worked on Street View and Google Art Project
- A Senior Industrial Designer at Google who has developed a photography app for iPhones named Pic and Click in 2013
Camera bracelet Inventors: Rachael Elizabeth Roberts, Mohammed Waleed Kadous, Romain Clement, and Xi Chen Assigned to: Google Inc. US Patent D764,339 Granted August 23, 2016 Filed: September 8, 2014
Picture from Google Patent