We are all familiar with the touch interface on mobile phones, & most new phones are a dime a dozen with touchscreens, multi touch & the likes. Imagine a phone that can be made to call 911 snapping your fingers, or your boss followed by any obscene gesture you can think of. With the amount of new technologies that Apple have developed, patented & locked from the public domain other companies are in race against each other to come up with a even newer technology breakthrough that they can call their own. Nokia now on overdrive has come up with the S60, that seems straight out of a harry potter novel. After the iPhone announcement, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, Nokia engineers went shopping for the alternatives to Apple's multi-touch technology. Since iPhone relies so heavily on a capacitive multi-touch display and covered a lot of ground here with public and not yet public patent applications, that was out. One of the touch technologies that Nokia settled on, was Active Matrix LCD with Integrated Optical Touch Screen. They have licensed AMLCD technology developed by Planar inc., covered by a couple of patents, threw in some electronic perception capabilities covered by these three patents from Canesta Inc., and went on to develop their own multi-touch device. What they've got is AMLCD technology based touchscreen that is able to recognize multi-touch gestures quite well. In this implementation, the device has optical sensors embedded throughout the display, that can identify fingers placed on it and record their movement. These recorded movements are then translated into control gestures using pattern recognition methods. Various one, two or multiple finger gestures can be used to perform different operations.

Just a glimpse of how a few 3D gestures are translated into various object oriented, or gesture/browsing oriented commands. The patent application gives several examples.

Single finger based Gestures/commands

* Clockwise, counter clockwise circular rotations - browsing, scrolling listing applications
* Subsequent typing by a single finger (Tap1-Tap2…) - activate device/phone, run/execute pre-selected option
* Finger stays motionless (over certain time threshold) above some object/icon - select object/icon
* Finger stays above some item/object/icon, followed by slow movement - select object till end of the move
* Crossed perpendicular lines (X mark) - Delete
* Perpendicular moving breach (Check mark) - Accept/Verify
* Enclosed Curve around group of items - Select enclosed items

Object oriented commands:

* Select: - Picking up gesture - Finger 1 at a display corner or some reserved area, Finger 2 moves slowly under a displayed object to be selected
* Copy: - when selected, click by single finger on the object
* Paste: - fast double click by a single finger
* Move: - move slowly two fingers located on moving objects
* Delete: - double (fast) click by two fingers on previously selected object
* Switch: - switching (on/off) is based on change in directions of fingers movement or, alternatively, on a change in finger acceleration

Gesture/browsing oriented commands:

* Select object attributed to the pointer position: Open/closed hand
* Forward/Backward Browsing: anticlockwise/clockwise cyclic rotation by a single finger
* Zoom in/Out: expand/close two fingers
* Run/Execute pre-selected icon/command: make a circle with your thumb and pointing finger (an OK sign)

It's nice to read about upcoming great features. But a patent application is just a peace of paper with some interesting, often far off ideas sketched on it. And most of these ideas usually stay that way.

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