Breaking Generational Patterns. I Didn't Break Mine, I Patented It.
My grandmother made the world stranger. My mother put people in it. I filed a patent.
My grandmother told stories the way other people breathe.
The one I’ve carried longest: a woman who slept under a mosquito net that filled with scorpions every night. In her world, the scorpions were not the problem. The scorpions were the protection. They kept the snakes out.
I don’t remember it exactly. I was small, and I’ve carried it for forty years, and I’ve never once tried to check it. That’s the point. There was nothing to check. She wasn’t selling me anything and she wasn’t taking anything. She handed me a world where scorpions guard you from snakes, and then we had lunch.
She made the world bigger for whoever was in the room. That was the instrument in its native use.
My mother inherited it and aimed it.
There were cups at the Ramla–Lod market that “asked her” to buy them. Out loud, in the stall. The seller was “mistreating them,” they said, and they wanted to come home with her. So they did. We owned cups we didn’t need, rescued from a man who was never told he’d been cast as a villain.
Same faculty. A world improvised in real time, vivid enough to stand in. A reader would file both under magical realism. The scorpions, the cups. The difference is casting. My grandmother’s worlds had no parts in them; you visited, and then you had lunch. My mother’s had people inside, and the people had parts to play, and the parts were assigned. Someone abuses. Something suffers. She rescues.
That is the whole difference, and it is not a difference of talent.
And I took it all at face value. Not belief, exactly. Not doubt either. When you grow up where this is normal, you don’t fact-check the house you live in. The scorpions and the cups arrived the same way — same door, same warmth — and I filed them in the same drawer. That’s where it gets tricky. One of those stories had a real man in it.
The patent application was due in three days.
It was two in the morning. The whiteboard covered an entire wall. Tracking algorithms in blue marker, vector diagrams, depth sensor specs copied out of Microsoft’s Kinect documentation. I wasn’t a computer scientist. What I had was an animation background and an idea that wouldn’t let me sleep.
The idea was not augmented reality. AR existed; engineers owned it. The idea was a platform — Photoshop for AR. A visual tool where an animator could build the illusion herself: track a person’s body with an ordinary camera, layer them into an impossible world, in real time. No motion capture suit. No markers. No code. Just a person, a webcam, and one tracking point.
I drew all seven figures myself. The camera setup, the skeleton tracking, the virtual environment layers. My wrist ached from the mouse. Patent drawings have rules. I didn’t know the rules, so I drew until it looked right.
The hardest part wasn’t the drawings. It was translating what I knew as an animator into the language of claims and specifications. Into something defensible.
Claim 1 was the foundation:
An apparatus for motion capture comprising: a 3D camera configured to acquire depth data of at least one Natural User Interface object; a processing unit configured to receive the depth data from the 3D camera; identify at least one tracking point on the object based on the depth data; generate tracking data based on the at least one tracking point; and at least one graphic object designed to be controlled based on the tracking data.
Tedious, bureaucratic, bloodless.
Underneath the patent-speak: one tracking point. One point anchored to a real body, and you can make someone believe they are floating in space.
One was the minimum viable illusion.
The attorney’s feedback arrived at 2:17 AM. Red lines everywhere. She wanted three tracking points. Industry standard for skeletal tracking.
But that wasn’t true. Three was better. One was enough.
We went back and forth for two days. She argued technical validity. I argued minimum viable reality. On the third day she conceded.
Filed November 24th, 2013. Forty-four claims. Seven pages of drawings. Later cited by Intel, Samsung, Microsoft.
I fought three days to keep a single word. One.
I didn’t know yet that I was writing the physics of my mother’s house.
She didn’t need forty-four claims. She needed one.
One verifiable story. One name that checked out. One date you could look up and find real. Everything after that could be anything at all, because it wasn’t being checked against the world any more. It was being checked against the anchor.
One tracking point, properly placed, locks the whole illusion.
I know that because I proved it, on paper, and a patent office agreed with me.
People talk about breaking generational patterns. In my family, nothing gets broken. It gets repurposed. The scorpions never leave the net. Someone just decides what they keep out.
Years later I sat at my desk. Clean, mine, secular, and opened the pitch deck.
Onysus empowers the creative industry by providing easy access... Our patent-pending platform enables anyone... no technical skills required...
I’d said these words a hundred times. To accelerators, investors, conference halls. I’d learned to say them the way you learn to sing. Not thinking about the words, just the delivery. The eye contact. The pause before strategic partnerships. The slight lean forward on immersive experiences.
Real-time visual effects can create an infinite amount of illusions... giving it a natural look...
An infinite amount of illusions. A natural look.
Through the wall, I could still hear my mother’s voice, the low warm tone she used for her clients. Somewhere on the other side a man was paying by the hour to have his blocks cleared, his reality refined, his world re-rendered into something he could bear.
I closed the deck.
We were both selling overlays. The difference was that mine had a patent.
I opened the deck again. I had a round to close.
The Keeper of the Mundane · A memoir.
My grandmother’s stories. My mother’s cosmology. My record of both.