Multi-touch Manipulation API for Cross-device Application Compatibility
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing multi-touch hardware devices require proprietary interfaces and software modifications for each device, limiting application compatibility and market potential, and pose challenges in interpreting user intentions from touch inputs.
Innovation Solution
A common platform and API that facilitates communication between applications and multi-touch hardware devices, interpreting multi-touch inputs as manipulations to support transformations like rotation, resizing, and translation, allowing applications to focus on user intentions rather than low-level touch processing.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If applications use proprietary interfaces for each multi-touch hardware device, then device-specific functionality is achieved, but application compatibility and market potential are limited
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a universal multi-touch interface that enables applications to interact with different multi-touch hardware devices through a common API. This universal interface abstracts the hardware-specific details, allowing a single application to work across multiple device types without requiring device-specific versions, thereby improving application compatibility and market potential.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent employs an intermediary layer (the universal multi-touch interface) between applications and hardware devices. This intermediary translates hardware-specific touch inputs into a standardized format that applications can process uniformly, eliminating the need for applications to directly interact with proprietary hardware interfaces and reducing interface complexity.
2Ease of operation
If applications include software to interpret touch coordinates and determine user intentions, then application-specific functionality is achieved, but development complexity and time requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the complex task of interpreting touch coordinates and determining user intentions from individual applications and consolidates it into a unified multi-touch interface layer. This extracted functionality is handled centrally, allowing applications to simply respond to high-level manipulation events without implementing their own interpretation logic, thereby reducing development time and complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent performs preliminary interpretation of touch inputs and determination of user intentions before applications receive the data. By pre-processing the touch coordinate data and translating it into meaningful manipulation commands (such as pinch-to-zoom or palm-to-rotate), the system eliminates the need for applications to perform this complex analysis during development.
3Productivity
If applications produce different versions for different multi-touch hardware devices, then device-specific optimization is achieved, but market potential and incentive to write applications are reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The patent enables a single universal version of an application to function across multiple multi-touch hardware devices through a common interface API. This universality eliminates the need for applications to be redeveloped or recompiled for different hardware platforms, significantly improving development efficiency while maintaining broad device compatibility.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent allows applications to adapt to different hardware devices by changing parameters such as touch sensitivity thresholds, gesture recognition criteria, and input processing speeds rather than requiring complete code changes. This parameter-based adaptation enables a single application binary to optimize its behavior for different devices while maintaining core functionality.
Data Source
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AI summary
The manipulation system described herein provides a common platform and application-programming interface (API) for applications to communicate with various multi-touch hardware devices, and facilitates the interpretation of multi-touch input as one or more manipulations. Manipulations map more directly to user intentions than do individual touch inputs and add support for basic transformation of objects using multiple touch contacts. An application can use manipulations to support rotating, resizing, and translating multiple objects at the same time. The manipulation system outputs two-dimensional (2D) affine transforms that contain rotation, scale, and translation information. Thus, using the manipulation system the application author can focus more on building touch-capable applications and let the manipulation system handle the underlying transformations and communication with the multi-touch hardware.