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February 20, 2008

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Apple patents the art of “advanced multi-touch”

Posted Feb. 20, ’08, 10:09 AM PT by Aayush Arya
Category | Apple » News

Advanced multi-touch patentThere are few things Apple loves as much as patenting everything they are working on, whether the technologies and products ever make it to the market or not. One of the most recent filed by the company is authored by Wayne Westerman of Fingerworks (the company that was working on gesture recognition and was acquired by Apple) and details how an advanced multi-touch system could be implemented on Mac notebooks in the future.

The patent describes the MacBook Air, iPhone, and iPod touch as having only basic multi-touch capabilities (shame, shame!). Apparently, these more advanced trackpads of the future (if and when they appear) will allow you to put all your fingers to work—the little pinky finger had been feeling left out and forlorn lately.

Among the various gestures described are combinations of adjacent and non-adjacent fingers that will allow you to perform several actions such as cut, copy, paste, etc., as well as trigger functions such as Exposé and Dashboard without ever having to hit a button.

Perhaps the most interesting of the lot is the exclusive role of that tiny little finger (yeah, you can do more than just pick your ear with it). The patent describes that it forms a unique pattern when placed sideways against any surface (try it and you’ll see what we’re talking about) and the software could be coded to recognize that and trigger any configured action.

Neat stuff, huh? It does sound a little complicated and I’m guessing that if Apple does implement this, they may have a hard time instructing people on the various gestures and their purposes. Imagine twenty different movies in the trackpad pane of System Preferences showing how to perform each gesture. But then again, if any company can bring all these features to the general consumer in a usable form, it’s Apple (yes, I’ve been drinking the Kool-aid). Let’s just hope they do.

[Via Mac Rumors]


1 Comments

Brian said:

Is anyone else besides me wishing these were gestures you could make on the *screen* instead? Maybe I'm too in love with my iPod touch, or just one of those holdouts who wishes Apple would make a tablet Mac, or (better) go all the way and turn the iPod platform into the next Newton (there, I said it :)

February 20, 2008 11:28 AM

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