e: Someone posted this on the Ubuntu Forums, and I finally found it and responded. Here's an excerpt from said reply that will hopefully shed a bit more light on what happened here:
Where do we begin... I guess I'll give an overview of the real story:
Back in December of 2007 I saw the famed Wii Remote head-tracking video by Johnny Lee. It was awesome, and I popped into #compiz-dev as I usually did back then and said "I'm porting this to Compiz". I didn't have a wii remote at the time, but SmSpillaz (Sam, a fellow Compiz developer, and now one of the head guys for community management two years later) did, so I wrote up the code, which took a few weeks of poking around with other plugins. This was my first functional plugin for Compiz. Eventually, we got it working and SmSpillaz recorded what is one of the worst video demos ever. This is all in January-February of 2008. A few months later, Apple files this patent. Two months after that, with the help of a forum-goer / programmer, we had it ported to a webcam with OpenCV using the OpenCV facetracking demo. It worked great, and we have videos of it in action, clearly doing its job. Eventually, I got a system with a webcam (yeah, finally, I can use my own plugin!) and recorded the last video we ever took of the thing, and that was it. It's been idle since February of this year. Eventually I moved to another (completely unrelated) community and my Compiz work was a good conversation piece. A few days / weeks before the patent went public, one of my friends on this community was rather obsessed with my work (...), and the day before this news release came out I took the time to get everything squared away to continue work and try and get my tutorials fixed up so they could actually use it. I did a git-pull that night. Now, like any other Internet denizen, I read a lot of Gizmodo / Engadget / what have you, and as with any other morning I made the rounds. And found this news article. And I got pissed. You see, I'm mildly bi-polar, and I'm a bit cranky in the morning to begin with, so this definitely isn't helpful. The blog post the OP linked was what resulted from an entire day of link hunting, after blowing off steam at a chemistry final (which I got a B on, and this probably didn't help that, but you won't see me contacting my college about it any time soon).
Well... That looks... oddly familiar. I could swear I've seen this before.
The patent was filed in June of 2008, while the last commits to our original prototype were made on "2008-02-11" (that's February 11th in this date scheme) ~ We have videos from the same year of the Wiimote prototype. The entire thing was working on a Wiimote in January of '08. I do believe I win for prior art (though the webcam-enabled version wasn't out until seven months later, two months after the patent). More specific window-stacking video from September of '08. And more importantly this video from February of '08 proves our prior art.
The article on MacRumours.
e: After reading and verifying, the way the patent describes the "sensing mechanism" leaves it open to the infrared camera and light setup of the Wii remote, so our original plugin should fully suffice, and we have video footage of it in action long before Apple filed the patent.
Discuss this news post here.
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