Apple wants its touch-enabled devices to respond differently to the speeds at which you touch them as evidenced by a newly granted patent for “Speed Adapted Touch Detection.”
About the patent
The patent relates generally to the field of touch detection, and more specifically to the field of utilizing a determined speed of a finger, hand, or touching object, to dynamically modify a touch detection technique. Obviously, one way that users often interact with digital information on their device is through a touch screen interface.
Touch screen interfaces allow a user to interact with a display surface using a finger, stylus, or other object. A touch sensor recognizes the area touched and provides a response to a user.
Users most often use their fingers to interact with computer user interfaces (UIs) such as by clicking buttons on keyboards or on touch screens. They might interact with UIs with variable frequency.
As an example, a user may move quickly from one button to another. As another example, a user might also click buttons at a low frequency and their finger/hand’s move at a low speed. Apple says that what’s needed is “a touch detection technique that is modified dynamically according to the speed of the user.”
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “Detecting a touch includes receiving image data of a touching object of a user selecting selectable objects of a target surface, determining a rate of movement of the touching object, in response to determining that the rate of movement satisfies a predetermined threshold, modifying a touch detection parameter for detecting a touch event between the touching object and the target surface, and detecting one or more additional touch events using the modified touch detection parameter.”
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