The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last month was overrun with companies demonstrating 3D television systems for the home. But despite the impressive viewing experiences on offer, the spectre of a lengthy battle between competing formats hangs over the latest shiny offerings.

TV studios and hardware companies alike are now building on the public’s rediscovered love of 3D movies. Satellite broadcaster Sky recently treated press to examples of soccer games and boxing matches filmed in 3D by strapping two regular cameras side by side, and Panasonic last week started to make 3D Blu-ray video discs at its Hollywood factory.

However, anyone interested in a 3D system for the home must pick between three or more very different and incompatible technologies. At present, material designed for one system usually cannot be played on another.

Polarised views

One approach – already well established for virtual environments used by engineers and surgeons – involves a home theatre projector running at high frequency to deliver left and right images in rapid succession.

The viewer wears that alternately block the left and right eye view to ensure that each eye only sees the correct viewpoint – timing is synchronised via a wireless link with the projector.

ąĘ˛š˛Ô˛š˛ő´Ç˛ÔžąłŚâ€™s uses a plasma screen to flash the alternate left and right images, and should be on sale in the near future.

South Korean firm Hyundai uses to display left and right images simultaneously, using a filter over the screen to polarise the two images differently. The viewer wears polarising spectacles to see 3D image.

This system is already on sale in Japan, where limited 3D TV broadcasts started last year, and has also been .

‘Confusing’ situation

Experts say that the sudden appearance on the market of incompatible rival technologies could hold the 3D home movie back.

“With several competing technologies – and none of them adopted as industry standards – the fragmentation could seriously impede progress, generate confusion and slow consumer uptake,” says Sarah Carroll, at consumer electronics research firm .

The closest the industry currently has to a standard is ąĘ˛š˛Ô˛š˛ő´Ç˛ÔžąłŚâ€™s campaign to add 3D playback to the Blu-ray standard.

If other manufacturers get on board, the move could lead to a single format for discs or broadcasts that any 3D or even 2D TV set can play. So far they have put development of competing technologies first.

Patents were introduced to protect new ideas, and give inventors time to develop them without anyone else copying what they came up with. They have been the foundation of technological development in many countries for hundreds of years.

Every nation has its own patent laws and patent office which “examines” applications from inventors and their lawyers. If an application meets their criteria a patent is granted that gives the inventor a legal monopoly for a limited time, in most places 20 years. Once that expires anyone can use the idea and it cannot be patented again.

Patent libraries store ever-growing collections of all the patents ever published that are free for anyone to access. Only ideas protected by government secrecy acts are not available to view, but usually surface later.

Although there is no world patent office, the in Munich, Germany, issues patents that cover most European states.

And the in Geneva, Switzerland, speeds the issuing of patents in multiple countries. In recent years the number of patent applications has exploded, leading to heavy workloads for examiners and sometimes delays in making decisions.

Patents vs trademarks

Other arrangements exist to protect less technical ideas. Registered trade marks protect the way a business identifies itself or its services, for example a name or logo, for as long as the owner pays renewal fees. For more than 50 years żěèśĚĘÓĆľ has maintained , for example.

Registered designs exist to protect visual and ornamental features. Copyright gives long-lasting free and automatic exclusive rights to a work you have created. It can protect some technical innovations such as lines of computer code, but not ideas or concepts.

Trade secrets are not enshrined in law, but are carefully guarded commercial information, protected using contracts and civil law to prevent people telling others.

What makes a patent?

Although it’s convenient to talk of patenting an “idea”, patents are not usually granted on brainwaves or business plans, but only on practical devices or systems. The exception is the US where almost anything can now be patented, including business plans and ideas for new software. Plans to introduce similar rules to Europe have met strong opposition.

Apart from inventions that are obviously impossible, like perpetual motion machines, anything can win a granted patent. In fact it can be easier for wild ideas: the patent examiner searching previous patents for “prior art” is less likely to find it.

A “good” patent protects a novel idea for which there is, or will be, a commercial demand. Patents that no one will ever want to use, say a nuclear-powered corkscrew, are in practice worthless.

What’s the damage?

It costs money to apply for a patent and more money to keep it in force. Patent offices charge fees to examine, grant and renew patents. Inventors usually pay patent attorneys too because of the complexities involved in writing patent applications.

These are a careful mix of legal and technical wording. The legal scope of the document is defined by the “claims” at the end, while the main body of the application is there to back up those claims.

Applications that are too broad, for instance claiming monopoly on the wheel, will be rejected. Inventors must avoid that while still protecting an extensive scope of ideas.

For example, patenting a “wheel with blue spots” that makes a pattern as it rotates would not prevent anyone making a similar wheel with red spots. Using the phrase “light-reflecting spots” might prevent that from happening.

Patent validity and disputes

You might think the spots are an idea worth patenting – but it’s already too late. Any idea published, in print or online or even provably talked about openly cannot be patented.

Some inventors don’t want, or can’t afford, to patent their ideas and purposely publish a full description of their ideas. Doing that in an obscure place – “prophylactic publication” – can reduce the chance anyone else will use the idea but still prevent others from patenting it.

Other people, dubbed patent trolls, spend money only on patent applications, not on developing ideas. These “armchair” patents lie dormant until the troll can claim damages if anyone starts work on a similar idea.

Battles over patents, like this one over the Walkman, can be expensive and lengthy.

Watching patents

It’s probably fair to say that żěèśĚĘÓĆľ pioneered the idea of a regular patent watch, beginning in the 1970s in print and . Since the explosion in personal computing and gadgets, reporting on patents has become a mainstay of many publications tracking developments from companies like Apple.

And now patent offices have gone electronic, anyone can dive in. The largest patent issuers, , and patent offices all let you search and explore patents and patent applications online.

But finding surprising patents is difficult because they tend to come from unknown names and, by definition, you don’t know what you are looking for. The best method is to dive in and speed read some of the thousands of new patent applications published each week from the largest offices.

Over the years that has brought to light otherwise unknown ideas that are important, chilling and entertaining.

For example, patented ideas blocking internet phone calls are now the object of an .

Other finds like this one for pocket gadgets with radioactive batteries are less likely to come to fruition.

To keep up with the several new finds we make every week, or point your RSS reader to (what is RSS?)

Wouldn’t it be nice to see how well an off-the-peg or mail order suit fitted without trying it on? Sony Ericsson thinks it can help with a cellphone that makes this shopper’s dream come true.

First you enter your weight, height, waist size, age and hair colour into the phone. Better still, if you happen to have access to a 3D scanning kiosk that makes an accurate virtual model of your body, you can use the data from that.

Then, when shopping, you look for clothes with a coded identification tag which contains information on the item’s size, style and colour. When you enter the code into the phone, it sends a wireless instruction to a screen in the store that displays a picture of you wearing the selected items.

Of course it would be wise, says the patent, to try on the clothes before purchase anyway. But virtual fitting helps narrow the choice before doing any dressing and undressing.

One phone can store several profiles, so wives and husbands can shop for each other.

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Underwater GPS

GPS does not work underwater-the radio signals on which it depends cannot pass through water. So submariners have yet to benefit from the revolution in navigation that it allows.

Now engineers working for the US Office of Naval Research think they have found a simple way to let submarines and divers get an accurate GPS fix.

A base station is tethered to the sea bed at known depth and known GPS location. A submersible anywhere in the area sends out a sonar request pulse to which the base station replies with a signal which gives its GPS position and depth as well as the bearing angle from which the submersible’s request arrived.

The submersible then uses its own depth, which is easily measured, plus the round trip pulse time and the bearing angle sent by the base, to calculate its own position. Simple.

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Molten metal bomb

Torpedoes that carry no high explosives but can still blow up their targets are now a possibility, says the Naval Undersea Warfare Center at Newport, Rhode Island, US.

Conventional rocket-powered torpedoes are designed to dissipate heat into the water as they travel towards their target. This is necessary to stop them getting so hot that the high explosive payload self-destructs.

The Navy’s new torpedo has an outer shell of titanium which houses a payload of aluminium metal chunks. The heat from the rocket motor melts the aluminium en route, so by the time the torpedo reaches its target, the titanium shell is full of liquid metal.

On impact, a small charge ruptures the shell allowing the molten metal escape into and instantly vaporize the surrounding water. This creates an underwater vapour explosion with shock waves carrying molten metal shrapnel.

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For more than 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled through the world’s weird and wonderful patent applications, uncovering the most exciting, bizarre or even terrifying new ideas. Read previous Invention columns, including:

Electronic treats, YouTube watermarks, hot lap prevention, edible RFID, covert iris scanner, personal TV censor, diamond-coated gadgets, computo-cooked perfection, Cellphone sunscreen, skateboard meets Segway, Taser gets tougher, razor light, wing-mirror cameras, body-wired headphones, rocket-repelling parachutes, tooth decay probe, laser healing, throwable game controllers, Microwave oven gun, Smart-card DVDs, Smart night scope, laser microphone, triple-standard DVD, ultimate body armour, Long-range stunner, tongue-o-vision, jellyfish injections, Flesh-burn sensor, fire-escape tubes, VoIP mangling, in-flight rearming, sense that fat, Designer speakers, throw-away parachutes, password-protected bullets, spinning touchdown, palmtop Feng Shui, Origami gadgets, mile-high showers, Hydrogen fuel balls, human cannonballs, the riot slimer, the bomb jammer, Apple’s all-seeing screen, the TV-advert enforcer, the wing-sprouting drone, the drink-driver arm scanner, laser spark plugs, remote-controlled implants,the “I’ve been shot” gun, the snore zapper, the guitar phone, explosive-eating fungus, viper vision, exploding ink, the moody media player, the spy-diver killer, preventing in-flight interference, the inkjet-printer pen, sonic watermarks, the McDownload, hot-air plane, landmine arrows, soldiers obeying odours, coffee beer, wall-beating bugging, eyeball electronics, phone jolts, personal crash alarm, talking tooth, shark shocker, midnight call-foiler, burning bullets, a music lover’s dream, magic wand for gamers, the phantom car, phone-bomb hijacking, shocking airport scans, old tyres to printer ink and eye-tracking displays.

Sticking to an exercise regime is always easier if there’s some sort of reward or punishment involved. Well, Sony Ericsson reckons that a phone or PDA could provide just the right incentive.

A wireless device could have a pedometer that set to a target – say 10,000 steps in a week. If the owner hits the target the device then downloads a ring tone, a music track or video clip by way of reward. Or, if the owner slacks off and misses the target, the device malevolently deletes a file from its memory.

If two people are competing to help each other lose weight, Sony says such devices could compare users’ exercise scores. The person who clocked up most steps then steals a reward from the loser’s device.

Whoever has walked the most gets a free song or video as well as the bonus of seeing the loser deprived of one. The loser might then wager even more rewards for the following week’s workout. The only snag is, by the time anyone has won they may be too tired to enjoy it.

Read the .

Conference hall calls

There may soon be no need for conference halls and other large spaces to install public address systems. Motorola reckons ordinary cellphones could be used as self-organising sound repeaters instead.

The technology could help make a speaker heard during a wedding reception, for instance. The speaker simply talks into their phone, which takes on the role of a master repeater, relaying the sound by cellular call, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to other devices nearby. These phones could also listen to the nearby ambient noise and adjust their sound level to make sure it is always audible. Those near the noisy wedding band would, for example, play a bit louder. And several devices grouped around a table would adjust their levels to create a cocoon of audio that envelops the listeners.

In a very large room, the sound could be sent to more distant devices with a slight delay designed to match the time it takes for the speaker’s live voice to reach them. This should make the live and the relayed sound blend into one, reinforcing the sound without creating an echo effect.

Read the full .

Smart ad-killer

Two inventors from Friedberg, Germany, have figured out a new way to automatically avoid TV adverts and record favourite TV shows.

It is already possible to manually fast forward through ads on a personal video recorder (PVR), or for software to automatically blank ads out by sensing fast cut scene changes and overly loud sound. However, trailers and some action movie sequences may accidentally be blanked too.

Similarly, companies like TiVo and Sky+ offer subscription services that can be used to automatically record shows based on the TV schedule.

But the new system could make things simpler, its inventors reckon. Instead, it would automatically recognise an advert by analysing the way colours are distributed over the first few frames, along with the precise rhythm of cuts, comparing these to a stored database.

The database is centrally updated and sent to paying subscribers’ TVs, hard-disc recorders or PCs. The owner can then set their machine to automatically blank out all annoying advert, replace them with stored material or a quickly hop over to another channel.

The same system could also recognise a particular programme by its introductory sequence each time it is aired. The recorder could then automatically grab a favourite show as soon as the opening titles are transmitted.

Read the .

For more than 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled through the world’s weird and wonderful patent applications, uncovering the most exciting, bizarre or even terrifying new ideas. Read previous Invention columns, including:

YouTube watermarks, hot lap prevention, edible RFID, covert iris scanner, personal TV censor, diamond-coated gadgets, computo-cooked perfection, Cellphone sunscreen, skateboard meets Segway, Taser gets tougher, razor light, wing-mirror cameras, body-wired headphones, rocket-repelling parachutes, tooth decay probe, laser healing, throwable game controllers, Microwave oven gun, Smart-card DVDs, Smart night scope, laser microphone, triple-standard DVD, ultimate body armour, Long-range stunner, tongue-o-vision, jellyfish injections, Flesh-burn sensor, fire-escape tubes, VoIP mangling, in-flight rearming, sense that fat, Designer speakers, throw-away parachutes, password-protected bullets, spinning touchdown, palmtop Feng Shui, Origami gadgets, mile-high showers, Hydrogen fuel balls, human cannonballs, the riot slimer, the bomb jammer, Apple’s all-seeing screen, the TV-advert enforcer, the wing-sprouting drone, the drink-driver arm scanner, laser spark plugs, remote-controlled implants,the “I’ve been shot” gun, the snore zapper, the guitar phone, explosive-eating fungus, viper vision, exploding ink, the moody media player, the spy-diver killer, preventing in-flight interference, the inkjet-printer pen, sonic watermarks, the McDownload, hot-air plane, landmine arrows, soldiers obeying odours, coffee beer, wall-beating bugging, eyeball electronics, phone jolts, personal crash alarm, talking tooth, shark shocker, midnight call-foiler, burning bullets, a music lover’s dream, magic wand for gamers, the phantom car, phone-bomb hijacking, shocking airport scans, old tyres to printer ink and eye-tracking displays.