Transmission Terminal, Non-Transitory Recording Medium, Transmission Method, And Transmission System
Patent No. US10909059 (titled "Transmission Terminal, Non-Transitory Recording Medium, Transmission Method, And Transmission System") was filed by Ricoh Company Ltd on Oct 16, 2019.
What is this patent about?
’059 is related to the field of video conferencing systems, specifically addressing the problem of displaying information about participants when the number of participants exceeds the display capacity. In typical video conferences, each participant's video feed is displayed on the screen. However, when many participants join, the individual video feeds become too small to be useful, and users lose track of who is present.
The underlying idea behind ’059 is to decouple the display of video feeds from the display of participant count. Instead of showing every video feed, the system displays a numerical count of total participants alongside a limited number of video feeds. This allows users to quickly understand the scale of the conference without sacrificing the visibility of key participants.
The claims of ’059 focus on a transmission terminal that displays both the total number of participants in a video conference and the video feeds from some of those participants. Crucially, the number of displayed video feeds is less than the total number of participants, meaning the terminal shows the total count even when it can't display all video streams .
In practice, the invention involves a transmission terminal requesting the total participant count from a central server. The terminal then displays this count in an auxiliary area on the screen, alongside the video feeds of selected participants. This auxiliary area can be configured to show other relevant information, such as elapsed time or network bandwidth, and can be displayed in different modes (standard or simplified) or hidden entirely based on user preference.
This approach differs from prior solutions that either limit the number of participants or force users to switch between a video display mode and an information display mode. ’059 allows users to maintain a view of active video feeds while simultaneously knowing the total number of participants, providing a more informative and user-friendly experience, especially in large conferences.
How does this patent fit in bigger picture?
Technical landscape at the time
In the early 2010s when ’059 was filed, video conferencing systems were becoming more prevalent, at a time when systems commonly relied on dedicated hardware encoders/decoders rather than purely software-based solutions due to processing constraints. Displaying multiple video streams simultaneously often required careful management of bandwidth and processing power, when hardware or software constraints made efficient video compositing non-trivial.
Novelty and Inventive Step
The examiner approved the application because the prior art of record does not explicitly teach or fairly suggest a transmission terminal comprising processing circuitry configured to display, on the screen of the transmission terminal, respective sets of image data transmitted by transmission terminals participating in the video conference to each other, wherein the number of the sets of image data, transmitted by transmission terminals participating in the video conference to each other, to display on the screen of the transmission terminal is smaller than the total number of transmission terminals participating in the video conference. Furthermore, it would not have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to combine the above limitations of the claim with the remaining limitations.
Claims
The patent includes 6 claims, with independent claims numbered 1, 3, 4, and 6. The independent claims generally focus on a transmission terminal and a method for conducting a video conference where the number of displayed image data sets is smaller than the total number of participants. The dependent claims generally elaborate on the information displayed concerning the participants.
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Date
Description
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US10909059
- Application Number
- US16654752
- Filing Date
- Oct 16, 2019
- Status
- Granted
- Expiry Date
- Mar 31, 2035
- External Links
- Slate, USPTO, Google Patents