Iluminating, exhaustive article and illustrated history of multitouch. I wonder how many of these papers, prototypes and devices the patent examiners came across when they were deciding on the prospective multitouch patent now owned by Apple. Money quote:<p>----<p><i>Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touchin 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee<p><pre><code> Westerman, Wayne (1999). Hand Tracking,Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface. U of Delaware PhD Dissertation: http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf
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In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."</i><p>----<p>Interesting examples relating to pinch-to-zoom:<p>[o] 1983: Video Place / Video Desk (Myron Krueger)<p>His use of many of the hand gestures that are now starting to emerge can be clearly seen in the following 1988 video, including using the pinch gesture to scale and translate objects: <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo" rel="nofollow">http://youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo</a><p>[o] 1991: Digital Desk(Pierre Wellner, Rank Xerox EuroPARC, Cambridge)<p>Clearly demonstrated multi-touch concepts such as two finger scaling and translation of graphical objects, using either a pinching gesture or a finger from each hand, among other things.<p>This page makes it quite clear how improvements in this subfield of tech, like in many other fields, are evolutionary and build upon existing ideas in the literature. Many potential implementations have been proposed and experimented with. What role do patents play in this picture? What is the breadth of Apple's pinch-to-zoom patent - how far does it extend beyond smartphones? Are any of these devices close enough to the patent to legally count as prior art?<p>Thanks for this great submission. Buxton has been referenced on HN a few times before, but it's my first time reading his page.