(19)Fresh off Patent
(45) Week of Oct 5, 2026 No. 5 3,852 lapsed 197 picks
Software & AI · lapsed Aug 28, 2026

3D scatter of emails grouped by thread, navigable by hand gestures

A system that plots email records as points in a 3‑axis (time, frequency, recipient count) 3D space, groups those points by subject/thread, links each thread's points with a curved line to show the stream, and lets a user move/rotate/zoom the 3D view with a motion sensor or similar operation detector. It was aimed at making large volumes of email activity visually navigable on a 3D display or HMD.

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(57) What the patent covered

The main independent claim required storing email records that include subject, timestamp, send/receive frequency, and recipient count; mapping timestamp, frequency, and recipient count to three orthogonal axes; plotting each email as a point in the 3D space; classifying points into groups using the subject attribute; linking points in each group with a curved line to represent the thread; displaying that graph; and accepting user gestures (absolute hand/finger position in 3D) to translate/rotate/zoom the view.

The distinctive part: Linking per‑thread email points in a 3D attribute space and controlling the 3D view with absolute 3D hand/finger position input.

Novelty 3/5. At filing time visualizing time‑series and communication statistics and per‑thread email views were common, but tying three specific email attributes into a 3D scatter and explicitly drawing curved per‑thread streams plus gesture control was a clever combination rather than a wholly new class of product.

Building it

A small team would extract email metadata into a table, compute per-message coordinates (time → x, frequency metric → y, recipient count → z), group records by normalized subject/thread ID, render points and smooth curved polylines for each thread in a WebGL scene, and add camera controls driven by a hand‑tracking SDK that maps hand position/gestures to orbit/pan/zoom actions.

Components: Email dataset with fields: subject, timestamp, send/receive frequency metric, recipient count, 3D visualization component (WebGL/three.js or Unity), Gesture/operation detector (depth camera like Kinect, Leap Motion, or hand‑tracking in HMD), Backend service to compute grouping and coordinate mapping (Node/Python), Display: desktop 3D monitor, HMD, or large touchscreen

Buildability 5/5. Implementation needs only common tools and libraries; the main work is data cleansing (threading subjects), deciding a frequency metric, and tuning visual encodings for readability.

Is anyone buying?

We haven't run a demand check on this one yet. Shoppers would likely search for email thread visualization 3D, gesture controlled data visualization, scatter plot time frequency recipients; the links on the right open those searches.

Who buys it: productivity or e‑discovery tooling teams; power email users and analysts

Before you make it

We didn't find any related continuation or divisional patents still in force, although that doesn't rule out design patents, trademarks or unrelated patents covering the same product.

Practical limits include noisy subject lines (threading accuracy), visual clutter on dense datasets, accessibility/usability of 3D views, and related patents in email visualization and hand‑gesture UI.

Owners occasionally revive lapsed patents (about 1.5% are), and this page is a research lead rather than legal advice, so get a freedom-to-operate opinion before you manufacture anything.

Claim 1, as granted

1. An information processing system, comprising: an information processing device; a display apparatus; and an operation detecting device, wherein the information processing device includes a storage circuit that stores a plurality of pieces of data having four types of attributes indicating a subject of an e-mail, time of sending and receiving of the e-mail, frequency of sending and receiving of the e-mail, and a count of e-mail recipients, and a control circuit, wherein the control circuit that: allocates the time of sending and receiving of the e-mail, the frequency of sending and receiving of the e-mail, and the count of e-mail recipients as three mutually different attributes to respective axes of a three-dimensional space; generates a graph plotting the plurality pieces of stored data of the e-mail on the three-dimensional space as respective points corresponding to the plurality pieces of data; classifies the plurality pieces of plotted data into groups using an attribute indicating the subject of the e-mail of the four types of attributes; and processes the plurality of points so as to be identified by the group by generating a line having the point representing data included in the group, wherein the processing includes linking the plotted data with the curved line per-thread based on the subject of the e-mail to represent the stream, wherein the display apparatus displays the graph processed by the control circuit, the operation detecting device detects an action performed by a user by detecting an absolute position of the user's hand and finger in the three-dimensional space, the control circuit moves, rotates, zooms in, and zooms out the graph displayed on the display apparatus depending on the user's action detected by the operation detecting device, and the control circuit displays, on the display apparatus, contents of the data adjacent to a part that the user is attempting to pinch, as preview images in the positions corresponding to the respective data.