New, Star Trek-ish Apple multitouch patent surfaces

perfect for 10/GUI !!!

http://10gui.com/

This is definitely not new tech! It is already being done by CircleTwelve with their Diamond Touch table! Its not only multitouch, its multi-user-multi-touch! It differentiates between users on the same surface, at the same time! I hate when some companies takes credit for things that have long before been done! http://www.circletwelve.com/products/diamondtouch.html

This isn't new patent material: as Appleinsider points out, this is an expanded version of a patent application from 2008. In that one, there was a lot of detail about different embodiments of how the physical surface would interact with the user, including a soft skin that could variously include a roughened or bumpy area to guide the hands to home row and even miniature bumps that could rise and push up the surface skin in keyboard mode to provide tactile feedback for typing. There's a lot more there than today's and yesterday's shortish reports let on, and it is VERY interesting.

Um, WTF? All the figures AI thinks are so amazing are pulled straight from the original FingerWorks patent: http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6323846

I think it would be interesting to see this combined with the previously rumored Apple tablet / iPad / netbook - a 10" touchscreen device that allows the use of both hands?

The problem with this is that tapping your fingers onto a solid, non-giving surface is bad for them when done long term and can lead to problems. They found this out with those cool keyboards you can get for your PDA... the ones that shine the keyboard onto a surface and you type on the virtual keys.

somehow when i saw this i thought of Minority Report. cool idea tho

Well this would seem to be a fairly natural chain of evolution wouldn't it? First, Apple moving from a trackpad to include a trackpad you can tap for a left or right click, then the glass trackpad which doesn't even need a button, plus multitouch commands. You'd think the only way to take it further would be to somehow make it even larger and integrate keyboard functionality. Although, I have no idea how it could completely replace a keyboard even in the future, tactile feedback is a must.

Ok, let's see...

This is a patent that emulates the Star Trek bridge command center (effectively conceived and designed over 30 years ago), using multi-touch technology (which dates back to 1982!) on a relatively large computer-based video screen (microsoft Surface, for one).

What happened to the "non-obviousness" clause with regards to patents?

While all this technology is fairly intriguing, I think that tapping away on a glass panel all day would be rather fatiguing without any tactile response. The occasional typing on my iPhone without any feedback is bad enough.

This looks exactly like the input method from the Touchstream devices which used to come out of Fingerworks, who Apple tapped to work on their multitouch... The pioneers of multitouch really. What is new on the patent is integrating it into a device.