[IxDA Discuss] Apple's Gesture Dictionary

[Will Parker]

On Aug 6, 2007, at 11:20 AM, Morten Hjerde wrote:

> Errr... maybe I'm slow but Apple has made a patent application for a
> dictionary "application", not for the content of such a dictionary.  
> They
> describe various methods for looking up gestures in a dictionary. I  
> cant see
> that they claim to have invented gestures. Could someone who can read
> patentese confirm?
>
> Morten
>
> PS
> I strongly agree that patenting the gestures themselves is a  
> patently stupid
> idea. Gestures are just abstract representations, it would be like
> attempting to patent the Ctrl-C shortcut.

Morten:

As you correctly noted, this patent is definitely NOT about patenting  
specific gestures. While the images in the patent do show specific  
gestures associated with specific commands, all these are explicitly  
marked as "exemplary [gesture] dictionary entries".

The text of the patent describes in great detail how gestures may be  
captured, concatenated, modified, displayed, and assigned to device  
actions, but _all_ references to specific gestures are given as  
examples, not patentable patterns. Nothing here is going to prevent  
others from coming up with a different set of methods for handling a  
user's gesture preferences. However, it's quite clear that the Apple  
UX team has been beavering away on this subject for quite some time,  
and it will be interesting to watch how the other multi-touch leaders  
handle the same problem.

N.B. - The REALLY interesting part is Apple's breakdown of how many  
types of gestures the human hand can make relative to a touchscreen  
surface. The money quote is this:

"With each hand able to execute twenty-five or more chords, and with  
each chord having thirteen or more motions associated therewith,  
there may be over three hundred possible gestures for each hand. Many  
more gestures are possible if both hands are used together."

This indicates that Apple has -- or believes it has -- some means of  
distinguishing between individual fingers on the hand or hands  
touching the screen, and indeed one of the figures shows a method of  
setting gesture meaning based on which fingers of the hand are used  
to make a gesture. I'll have to go back and _read_ the patent instead  
of skim. Too busy now.

- Will

Will Parker
wparker at ChannelingDesign.com


“I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If  
that were the case, then Microsoft would have great products.” -  
Steve Jobs