This page contains a video and several images showing some of the touch screen patents that Apple owns. Although the video appears to be for research purposes it contains some interesting footage on just how these patents could be used.
Just to confirm to the confused world this is no way affiliated with Apple (as far as we’re aware) but the hand gestures this guy uses in this video is very similar to those recently patented by Apple. Thus we came to the conclusion that this video would be an excellent an example of the potential in one of these products.
Incase the site goes down I’ve posted the movie over the jump
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Velourium
8th February 2006, 12.19 pm
Interesting, nonetheless. If Apple can introduce and market this(idea) with minimal bugs, I see this taking off very quickly, and with a little tactile feedback, we just my have a winner. The only thing that upsets me is the lack of a third dimension. Alhough this will bring us closer to that goal, I still wish to see something that really is leaps and bounds over the current “stone in a 2-dimensiional sandbox” method. Maybe the world isn’t ready for such an advanced idea yet, but kids will soon be able to harness such things via Nintendo Revolution. At any rate, I can’t wait to see how Apple defines the Finder, iTunes, iPhoto, heck even Chess with this stuff.
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markymark
8th February 2006, 12.31 pm
that is very cool indeed, and no latency.. hope my hardware can keep up!
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Zwung
8th February 2006, 13.43 pm
This is a must happen ofcourse, in the neverending process of genious inventions coming from Apple! Like Velourium I can’t wait to see the 3.dimension coming out to us ordinaries, so we can pretend we’re all “Mnemonics”. By the way how many is it that has a chip in their brain or arm or where ever, now?
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Seb
8th February 2006, 15.16 pm
Does the patent already belong to Minority Report author ?
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Justin
8th February 2006, 17.17 pm
Yeah, problem: if you’re using one hand to hold the tablet, you can’t use two hands…
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Yevgeny
8th February 2006, 17.52 pm
Yeah!!! Minority report becomes reality!!!
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ZLurker
8th February 2006, 20.33 pm
I could not find any reference to any apple patent on the page. How do you guys know the relation between this and apples patents?
I would love if this was included in the next few years. It would redefine how we interact with our computers totally
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Variant
8th February 2006, 21.51 pm
It’s an amazing application which I’m sure will change the world we live in. But in dealing with more present matters…
Does anyone know who the demo song is by?
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maddog
8th February 2006, 22.36 pm
Like Zlurker, I’m curious as to where you got the connection between this and Apple’s patents, other than they seem to deal with similar concepts.
J Hann’s webpage states that he is a consultant at New York University’s Media Research Lab. Is he conducting this research on behalf of Apple? Are they funding it in some capacity? Have Apple licensed his work?
If the aim of posting the video was to *illustrate* the type of patents Apple owns, that is a very different thing to stating “this is the work which forms the basis of Apple’s patents” which is effectively what you have implied. Clarification please.
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dANGO
8th February 2006, 22.59 pm
The music is by Peace Orchestra, track 7) who am i
The album was released in 1999.
Its Kruder, from Kruder and Dorfmiester.
Great music, get it if you can
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burning
9th February 2006, 02.01 am
Posted on macrumors.com a few days ago. They must have been doing this research for awhile now.
Note that the operating system is OS X. Kewl huh?
More Apple Tablet Patents - Gesture User Interface?
Thursday February 02, 2006 07:00 AM EST
Posted by arn
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Shawn
9th February 2006, 06.21 am
I see this as something cool, not really a new idea, and I can see it as EXTREMELY expensive tot he end user considering the Apple pricing schema.
I also have a hard time thinking of practical application to endusers.
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Jak
9th February 2006, 08.17 am
“Yeah, problem: if you’re using one hand to hold the tablet, you can’t use two hands…”
When I was watching I suspected the two hand gestures were for ease of comprehesion by us, the viewing audience. All that would be possible with use of fingers on one hand.
Perhaps adding eye tracking will be added at some point - although I can imagine the strain to look cross-eyed to create a pinching/reducing object response or wall-eyed to enlarge.
I like the practicality of the segment showing sorting of photos.
btw - Steven Wosniak worked on a 3D pen-like interface device some years ago. Wonder if it is still relevant. Anyone remember that?
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Wellesz
9th February 2006, 11.21 am
This is not as new as it seems to be! I am writing this very message with such a device right now: a TouchSream LP keyboard from FingerWorks who has “has ceased operations as a business” last year — http://www.fingerworks.com
Anybody knows whether this is related to Fingerworks guys or not?
You can have a look at some animations describing how gestures are handled
Here is one of them: Link
After one year of Fingerworks silence, it looks like a conspiracy to me. Their devices reach up to three times their price on eBay! This is because you have a hard time thinking what it would be to live without one of these once you are accustomed to use it everyday.
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munomasa
9th February 2006, 11.54 am
what the *** is that? I dont believe that, Now we dont need aquarium or something like that. good job apple, gratz. Btw I won’t have money to buy this
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gftk17
9th February 2006, 13.53 pm
The song can also be found on the animatrix soundtrack http://www.intothematrix.com/ lots of good songs on that cd and see the movie too.
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Peter Kirn
9th February 2006, 14.32 pm
This is not an internal Apple Computer video. Jeff Han, creator of the video, is a consultant with NYU’s Department of Computer Science. And the technology is just as cool with or without Apple’s name on it. See my discussion here:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1152&Itemid=44
. . . from Tuesday. Unless I’ve missed something (various interactive technology blogs picked up the story early in the week), Mac sites simply seized on this video and assumed it was Apple’s?
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Peter Kirns Friend
9th February 2006, 15.48 pm
Yes this has absolutely nothing to do with Apple. Please fully read the site and how it was developed using cameras and infrared lights.
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Wellesz
9th February 2006, 15.56 pm
Maybe Apple has nothing to do with this but if they do have the former Fingerworks Team in their lab, you can bet they are going to be the winners in the Multi Touch domain…
The software aspect is quite challenging…
To get some insight on the subject, you can have a look at several years of users discussions on the Fingerworks Support Forums: http://forums.fingerworks.com.
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Thomas
9th February 2006, 17.24 pm
That’s not OS X. Why do you think it is? Because there’s something in ONE of the apps that looks kind of like the dock? A) it’s at the top of the screen, which is not likely to ever be supported by Apple, B) the guy touches it twice, in two different spots, and the app doesn’t switch.
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flux
9th February 2006, 17.33 pm
You can buy this:
http://www.jazzmutant.com/lemur_overview.php
today for $2,495.00.
Not quite as cool as this demo but similar…
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Kevin Russel
9th February 2006, 20.08 pm
Ahhh…and I was just thinking of Ken Perlin, NYU and my PAD lab rat days. If you look closely and can remember the CHI and SIGGRAPH UI literature, you’ll see and remember the lineage upon which this work is based. The multipoint finger based input device has been around since the harsichord and multiple points of presence of interaction within a medium is the bomb! The new real trick here is spacial and temporal mapping and gesture processing. Great work!
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Chris
10th February 2006, 10.41 am
The program with the dock is NASA World Wind.
(http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/) Very interesting technology here. I can see many uses for it, but I’m afraid it’ll be much to expensive for me for a while if it it ever released public.
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ChasmoeBrown
10th February 2006, 19.51 pm
Side note, FWIW:
Minority Report
Blade Runnner
Total Recall
All from stories by Philip K. Dick.
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Steven Weir
12th February 2006, 23.28 pm
If this picks up and is introduced, our entire desktops would become a single touch screen, large in size. The artistic applications for this are unbelievable, a new breed of photoshop using this technology would be amazing.
Games, Puzzles, adventures, shooting games, using this technology would be mind boggleing.
I believe this is the future for the home computer.
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Jon
13th February 2006, 00.29 am
CooL, Apple just keeps raising the Bar! Mac lover from the start.
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john
13th February 2006, 01.51 am
while i am enthused about this, i can’t really see this being a groundbreaking. don’t get me wrong, it’s ‘neat’ and ‘amazing’ and all that. but how does it enhance and increase efficiency for the average computer user? i would rather have the right, left, multiclick capabilities of a mouse. it just seems to be another little high-tech gimmick.
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mike
13th February 2006, 02.51 am
i love the music. the technology is also cool
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Brendon
13th February 2006, 04.52 am
I have to agree with John. While the technology showcased here is very cool and intriguing, its not really practical for most of the tasks you use your computer for. For example: Though the person in the demo types on the screen, the lack of tactile feedback would just make that harder to touch type than a keyboard. Resizing looks great with the touchscreen, but what about drawing lines and ‘clicking’ on something small or squeezed between two objects? Really everything done in the demo can be fairly easily reproduced with a mouse (or two if you wanted to get crazy =P).
Again, the idea is amazing and shows some potential in certain applications, but I don’t see this replacing the mouse anytime soon. The best part of the demo, in my opinion, is the programs they play with.
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ray andrews
13th February 2006, 11.07 am
I WAN’T ONE & I WANT IT NOW THATS WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE HADE FROM THE BEGINING GOOD GYE TO THE MOUSE I JUST CANT WAIT FOR HOLOGRAPHIC STATIONS TO WORK FROM THEN THERE WILL BE NO NEED FOR A MOUSE OR A SCREEN KEEP IT COMING
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Mestre
13th February 2006, 11.32 am
I´ve been wating for this Hi-tech Touch experience for long time… 5 stars, the very best I ever seen.. Congratulations…
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Iain
13th February 2006, 13.29 pm
The one thing i would say is those movements all look very easy on a screen that’s maybe 4ft wide. On a 3 inch they’d all be useless. So many of them clearly require two hands, but if you’re on the move you’ll be holding your i pod with one hand?!
Also at the end of the day all you want you i pod to do is play music and possibly video. The fancy stuff is just to make you continually buy the new one so that people don’t moan so much about the fact that they always break after a year!
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Tonez
13th February 2006, 15.15 pm
This looks like they took video from some SF movie. This is one of the best touch screens I ever seen specially how you can interact with resizing images and playing with them. Thank you for the video this is awesome stuff hopefully we will be able to buy something like this in a near future.
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Parallax
13th February 2006, 16.59 pm
Soo??? The interesting thing about the application is much less the technology itself than the fact that it is willing to transfrom the way input is made. Just watching the video makes you realize how antiquated and inefficient the concept of a keyboard as the primary tool of input is.
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Yoko Yamamoto
16th February 2006, 00.49 am
This will be an excellent next medium, tantamount to going from character screen to bitmap screen, or beyond.
Now they’d need one of the existing advanced keyboards, instead of QWERTY, to make the touch entry work. Something like fitaly or even better MessagEase, which is actually design for touch screens.
Yoko
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dave levi
16th February 2006, 09.04 am
any idea who did the soundtrack?
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Kebab
17th February 2006, 07.45 am
Awesome demo. Great software and ofcourse great touchscreen!!
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Jinder
18th February 2006, 12.07 pm
What Brendon and John is saying below is what exactly people were saying when Apple introduced Lisa and the Macintosh some 20 odd years ago…today GUI is a standard thanks to Apple(though we need to thank XEROX PARC too).
What they really like to say is that we will buy or use it once Microsoft makes a cheaper albeit slower, clunky and constantly hanging version! But at the current rate Microsoft is going(anyone seen the Vista Beta will know) we will still be clicking on the ‘START’ button to shutdown aPC well into the next century!
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Harrison
18th February 2006, 22.55 pm
Hey,
Has anyone tried downloading the video and turning up the contrast in windows media player. you can start to see under the stand the screen is on!
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Harrison
18th February 2006, 22.58 pm
and to dave levi
Peace Orchestra - Who Am I
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John
21st February 2006, 08.13 am
This is the future of computing for years to come… even if you don’t like it this has the potiential to bring everyone into the world of the computer.
They who own this (and produce a decent OS/Software to use it) shall be the face of computing for years to come.
Now all you need is handwriting recognition… oh look Apple is hiring for that already.
After this it’s down to waiting for holograms & forcefields (well magnetic repulsion/gravity systems)
PS your vid link is now broken
Oh wait there is one more thing you can add to it texture that maybe where this comes in handy…
http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/15/new-magnetic-chips-could-offer-higher-speeds-at-lower-power/
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Alex Aguilar
23rd February 2006, 05.27 am
This is a very wonderful and intuitive technological item and it is already revolutionizing the thoughts of the future today. The use of the hands is definitely wonderful and I have looked upon it that Apple is planning to identify thumbs and other fingers by the touch with the hand, and I think that maybe you can use the knuckles for making the right-click for something such as looking for applications, and then we scroll down with the fingers and choose the option. The potential of this revolution is titanic. You can use two pens to make it easier when looking or making something more precise and the use of the screen with other people can change the views of how people use a computer in another intuitive way, and I think how the video had shown that it can zoom out in all of the screens can display that you can place files anywhere and it makes it seem like space where each item will look like a star when viewed far away.
The creativity of this just blew my mind away, and I immediatly thought of how people thought of holographic projecters made from the future like the Jetsons or other shows representing the future way back when before we even thought this was possible. And now I stand here whitnessing one of the potentially greatest things ever made since the iPod made by Apple!. And I believe that they will provide the great quality again and show a good price for such amazing products.
My imagination of what will happen in ten years with this made sooner or later… I think that it will become another custom from people all around the world, and people will find it hard to live without when they have made this a daily part of their routines. This is truely a brother of Nintendo’s Revolution and I think that both of these will make the people realize the creativity that can be unleashed through human’s technology made today.
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Erika Varga
6th March 2006, 20.48 pm
While this technology is amazing, it is definitely not new. The ability to touch a screen multiple times was first introduced in the 70’s. If you’ve read the article by the creator, he is merely trying to make the device cheaper.
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pxlmvr
14th March 2006, 23.38 pm
People on apple forums thought that the ipod was a bust too. They figured its was another ‘cube’.
As a graphic artist and video editor, I would love to have an interface like this. Yeah a small tablet would be ok, but if i could get a desktop with that kind of input ability (along with a standard mouse and keyboard), large screen size, man, the sky’s the limit!
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pxlmvr
15th March 2006, 16.20 pm
oh yeah. the reason why i’d like it is because using both hands and multiple digits would speed workflows. The mouse, with its single control point, is very limiting even with ctl, opt and cmd modifiers. Just look how quickly he is able to work with resizing, etc. This would also be great for animators.
This would revolutionize workstations as well. What if the screen could be semi-circular and wrap around the person?
Now, this kind of technology would probably not be as useful for most people doing internet browsing, typical office work, etc where keyboard input and a 17″ screen are sufficient. But for power users particularly in the video field where I use two 21″ monitors, this indeed would be revolutionary.
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Ladikn
18th March 2006, 05.07 am
First off, this is great! I seriously can’t wait for this to hit the shelves. If this is not windows compatible, it will be enough to turn me away from my beloved PC…
But, as a amateur cheap-o game dev, the vast gaming potential for this. I mean, I can immagine starcraft on here so fluid…seriously, why would we ever need a mouse or keyboard with this? It showed that a keyboard can be overlaid easily on it, and a mouse seems almost primitive.
I can imagine a special glove for it, with a “stylus” coming out of each finger, for precise work.
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James
29th April 2006, 18.29 pm
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9059-invention-apples-allseeing-screen.html
“Apple’s all-seeing screen” sounds like a multi touch display to me.
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keam
22nd May 2006, 13.45 pm
so cool! amazing!!
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mmenchu
7th June 2006, 13.30 pm
Great, so now the way I move my hands it’s patented, ugh?
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Guy
26th June 2006, 03.15 am
Does anyone know what that game is called that they play at the end of the video?
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This is NOT APPLE research!!
30th June 2006, 17.23 pm
UMmmm…. just because this posting is on worldofapple.com … people are assuming this is an APPLE gig…
It’s actually Jeff Han’s Research project at NYU..
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
APPLE IS not going to spend money on something they can’t market right away.
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Pweet
7th July 2006, 08.42 am
If you like this, you should click here: BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype!
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aggnik
5th September 2007, 23.08 pm
Hello, sorry for my language i am greek and i do not know well the language. I d like to inform me for the interactive multitouch. This is marketable, it circulates in the market.If yes where can i find it. I wait for shorter possible information. Thanks
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naisioxerloro
29th November 2007, 02.33 am
Hi.
Good design, who make it?
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Idetrorce
15th December 2007, 15.16 pm
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
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My_name
26th February 2008, 23.21 pm
Just to reiterate what other people said previously in the post, this is not Apple, or an Apple product. This is Jeff Han’s research. He is a researcher at NYU in the cs department. See here, http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/, and for more about multi-touch displays, http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html
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