It took some time for me to identify it, but a story in the BBC about Microsoft's "Magic wand" patent application was tracked down as US 2009/121894, indeed titled Magic wand, which was published 15 May 2009.
It would have been helpful if it, and the many other news stories, had given the actual publication number. This is only an attempt to get protection, and not a granted patent, as some news stories say.
My usual Espacenet source does not yet give it as a document so I've linked to the official USPTO web site, which gives the description and claims as text, but the actual document (showing drawings) as tiffs. You have to have the right software to load it.
Magic wand is thought to be Microsoft's answer to the Nintendo Wii®. I'll leave it to the experts to "compare and contrast". This is a drawing from it.
The summary provided by Microsoft certainly sounds like it can do the same as the Nintendo product, but note the final sentence:
" The claimed subject matter relates to an architecture that can facilitate rich interaction with and/or management of environmental components included in an environment. The architecture can exist in whole or in part in a housing that can resemble a wand or similar object. The architecture can utilize one or more sensor from a collection of sensors to determine an orientation or gesture in connection with the wand, and can further issue an instruction to update a state of an environmental component based upon the orientation. In addition, the architecture can include an advisor component to provide contextual and/or comprehensive guidance in an intuitive manner."
awesome. Imagine playing Gears of War 2 with a wand!
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Posted by: ikaghe | 13 August 2009 at 09:50