IP Review Autumn 2017

6 ...Is this the real life? As expected, the large amount of investment and development in the HMD domain has made it quite the wellspring for innovation. This is evident from an examination of the patent filings of some of the major companies involved, as shown in the graph above. Microsoft dominated the early stages of innovation in AR, with an initial spike in published priority patent filings in 2012. At that time there was no published activity from ODG, but it is now known that it had many patent applications in the pipeline, because almost 100 patent applications were assigned to Microsoft in early 2014 in a multi-million dollar deal. This IP acquisition by Microsoft may have been key to the development of the Hololens, which was announced in 2015. ODG has nevertheless continued its own development of a range of smart glasses and has continued filing new applications, as can be seen from the increase in its published priority patent applications from 2013 onwards. In the meantime, 2014 onwards saw a significant rise in priority filings from Magic Leap, following funding rounds in 2014 and 2016 that resulted in over one billion dollars in total investment from investors including Google, Alibaba and Morgan Stanley - one of the largest investments in AR technology to date. Approaching 2015, there appears to be an overall increasing trend in priority filings for AR-related patents, at least in the USA, which goes hand in hand with the increasing investment in AR technology across the Atlantic. In the HMD domain, this comes from most of the companies previously mentioned, with additional activity from Intel, which has a hand in HMD developer Recon Instruments, and Daqri, with its development of industry-centric HMDs. IP review autumn 2017 Patent trends and key players