Apple is known for its design patents and anti-Apple fans hate Apple for those design patents! At the launch of iPhone in 2007 Steve Jobs took the stage and took us all through a fabulous journey with the iPhone and its UI. One of the most astounding feature was multitouch, which enables users to interact with the iPhone in a natural way with ease. Though multitouch is easy to use on large screen devices like the iPhone, devices like iPod nano still does not enable easy use of multitouch due to its minimalistic size and devices like iPhone drain battery for simple tasks like volume and media control by lighting up the screen to show the content on the screen. To avoid these hassles Apple, came up with a new multitouch patent that will enable Apple to implement multitouch gesture recognition on a supporting device even when the screen is off and does not display and GUI (Graphical User Interface).
Source: USPTO
The concept Apple patented will be quite useful on small screen devices where more than one finger cannot perform gestures and on large screen devices that drain battery for no reason to switch the display on and show the current screen content. General implementation like volume control or music track shifting will need the users to tap on the exact location on the display to perform the task but with Apple’s new patent all the user has to do is perform an associated gesture on the screen of the device when it is set to a mode that reads gestures, even when the display is off.
Apple posted a few examples in the patent filed, a simple circular gesture clockwise anywhere on the screen would increase the volume and anti-clockwise gesture would decrease the volume and all this right when the screen is off! Below is a complete list of basic gestures as suggested in the patent.
We would not be surprised if Apple starts implementing this feature right from iOS 7.0 itself as this needs no change in hardware at all and it isn’t too difficult to implement it in the OS, at least with few apps to start off with.