List of patented gestures

Someone seems insane, but IT companies began to patent physical gestures almost twenty years ago. In the era of touchscreens, Kinect and other interfaces, human gestures have become an object of intellectual property. Here is a list of ten US patents that limit your right to free movement with your hands, because some movements are foreign property.

1. Unlock slider . Of course, the patent for this gesture belongs to Apple Inc., which any iPhone owner will confirm to you. The patent describes a method for unlocking a mobile device by simply moving a finger across a screen in a straight line. In fact, not the gesture itself is patented here, but its specific use in the interface, so other manufacturers (for example, Android devices) do not have the right to implement the same unlocking principle in the interface (well, they invented something similar that supposedly does not violate the patent).

2. Multi-touch gestures for touchscreens . Critics say that Apple has slightly overdone this patent, because some gestures are more like the dance of the Bolshoi ballerina and hardly anyone can move their fingers like that. An application for this patent was filed in 2011 , and Apple is trying to book with it almost all possible multitouch-interface movements.


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3. Writing characters without taking the pen from the paper . If you do this, you are violating the Xerox patent . This came as a surprise to Palm 10 years ago when it launched the Palm Pilot and immediately received a giant lawsuit from Xerox . As a result, Palm registered a patent for drawing characters in several movements .



4. Move the icons on the smartphone using gestures . This is the wording contained in the Samsung patent , but they didn’t clarify exactly which gestures they have in mind. However, sooner or later Samsung will surely sue someone.

5. Any set of custom gestures to manage Kinect . Microsoft owns a patent for what it calls "gesture profiles" for controlling a game console. These are customized profiles that users can create by assigning a command to any gesture, even the most unusual and fictional in a fit of creativity. Thanks to this patent, Microsoft may prohibit other companies from using a similar system.

6. Flicking a pen somewhere . Strange, but Microsoft also owns a patent for "a system and a method for determining poking" (). Is the idea of ​​poking a finger or a pen somewhere so innovative and worthy of patenting?

7. Shaking mobile phone . Ever get angry at a broken phone and shake it so that it reboots? So you probably violated the Intellectual Ventures patent .

8. Moving 3D objects in a virtual environment - the corresponding patent belongs to Lucent. Unfortunately, we cannot now recreate interfaces from many science fiction novels without violating someone else’s intellectual property.

9. Movement with two hands . This is a rather strange patent company GestureTek . If you want to create a device that recognizes "bimanual gestures" (as stated in the patent), then you must pay royalties to this company.



10. Typing without lifting your fingers from the keyboard . You could hear about the keyboard Swype, which allows you to type text with the movement of your finger from one letter to another. Well, the corresponding patent belongs to the company of the same name.

Interestingly, one of the pioneers in the field of gesture control interfaces, Nintendo, does not possess a single patent for a particular gesture. Instead, they concentrated on patenting hardware solutions. For example, Nintendo owns a patent for any controller with an accelerometer , but not for ways to control it.