Microsoft Applies For Page-Turn Animation Patent

eldavojohn writes "Ever seeking to out innovate their competition, Microsoft has applied for a patent on animating page flips in devices like the Nook or Kindle. The application summary reads, 'One or more pages are displayed on a touch display. A page-turning gesture directed to a displayed page is recognized. Responsive to such recognition, a virtual page turn is displayed on the touch display. The virtual page turn actively follows the page-turning gesture. The virtual page turn curls a lifted portion of the page to progressively reveal a back side of the page while progressively revealing a front side of a subsequent page. A lifted portion of the page is given an increased transparency that allows the back side of the page to be viewed through the front side of the page. A page-flipping gesture quickly flips two or more pages.' Maybe you've seen this before?"

Comments

Hurry up and someone patent....

[3seas]

.... reading.....

Re:Hurry up and someone patent....

[Runaway1956]

To hell with reading. I'm going to see if I can patent ball scratching. Think about it - half the people in the world scratch their balls, even before they come out of the womb. Reading is just for the elite, who have had time, money, and coddling enough to learn to read. Scratching balls? I can sue people for patent infringement even before they are born! I'll be richer than Microsoft, Apple, Government Motors, and the United States Government combined!

Oh, for anyone who wonders - we have video from a sonogram that distinctly shows the kid scratching at his groin at around 7 months gestation. It's time we dragged that out and showed it to everyone again. LMAO

Prior art?

[thestudio_bob]

I've seen this on Flash years ago as well as a Shockwave (Director)... the only thing they bring to the table is "on a touch display".

Re:Prior art?

[mattventura]

the only thing they bring to the table is "on a touch display".

Not even that. I've seen iPhone ebooks that do this.

Re:Prior art?

[Nadaka]

I've seen that on a tactile touch display that even varies in thickness as a number of pages are turned and it is powered by the kinetic energy of the gesture.

Its called a god damn book.

Yeah, That's New

[mwandaw]

You gotta be kidding. There have been Flash animations like this available for years. I guess this is an example of a patent process gone wrong.

Next Patent...

[christoofar]

Microsoft Fast Page Flip Lick Moistener (TM). It's for when you moisten your index or other page-flipping finger on your tongue to flip faster.

Maybe you should ask the right question:

[Dachannien]

The real question is, has anyone seen this before:

Claim 1. A digital reading device, comprising:

a first touch display region;

a second touch display region;

a logic subsystem operatively coupled to the first touch display region and the second touch display region; and

a data-holding subsystem holding instructions executable by the logic subsystem to:

display a back side of a first page on the first touch display region and a front side of a second page on the second touch display region;

recognize a page-turning gesture directed to an outer corner of the second page;

display, responsive to the page-turning gesture, a virtual page turn that actively follows the page-turning gesture, the virtual page turn curling a lifted portion of the second page to progressively reveal a back side of the second page while progressively revealing a front side of a third page and while progressively covering the back side of the first page;

recognize a page-flipping gesture directed along an outer edge of the second touch display region; and

display, responsive to advancement of the page-flipping gesture, a virtual page flip in which pages quickly flip from the second touch display region to the first touch display region.

Re:Maybe you should ask the right question:

[tofubeer]

All the physical books on my bookshelf. Making a computer mimic the real world is 100% obvious.

Re:Maybe you should ask the right question:

[yyxx]

They didn't patent the implementation (which is unpatentable, even if it's a lot of work), they patented the look and feel. And the look and feel of this feature has been around for many years, implemented by other people who had to work a lot harder on ancient 3D hardware to make this look good.

This patent is theft and fraud, pure and simple.

doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter if it's been seen before, if you have a boatload of cash you need a boatload of defensive patents to keep the parasites who don't produce a thing off your back. Maybe companies like MS, that actually make stuff (whether you think their stuff is good or bad) and contribute, should just be auto-granted immunity from all that bullshit. As it is right now they have to think of and officially enumerate everything they don't want some worthless sleazeball non-company looking for a quick buck coming after them for.

I claim prior art

[WillAffleckUW]

I used that in a short story I wrote that was published in the 80s and it's on record both in the US and Canadian copyright systems.

MSFT can't patent what I already described in a public magazine.

Software patents suck ass

[turing_m]

A page-flipping gesture quickly flips two or more pages.

I'd flip Microsoft a gesture but they've probably patented that too.

You mean like this!!

[future assassin]

http://www.pixelwit.com/blog/page-flip/ I can flip the page back and forth on my works MultiTocuh monitor. Exactly like MS describes it. I've seen this about 5+ years ago on sites.

Prior Art

[bradgoodman]

Didn't the "Notepad" "Desk Accessory" in the Original (old-school) MacOS do page-turn animation?

Prior art from 32 years ago

[Stormwatch]

Animated virtual pages? Nicholas Negroponte has been there and done that, back in 1978.

Re:Spot the prior art

[WindBourne]

Hypercard on Apple by Winkle. late 80's.

OK, so what's the penalty for IP fraud?

[kale77in]

If IP theft is possible, then surely IP fraud must be? If I claimed to own any random houses I happened to see, and put them down as security on financial documents, this would be viewed dimly by the courts. This is that.

If patents secure intellectual 'property' then where's the aggressive penalty enforcement for intentional (or unintentional but negligent) misrepresentation of property rights? Given the money at issue, and their strain of their enforcement on the court system, these penalties ought to be severe, esp. for corporations. If anybody knows a government looking to increase revenue, then here's some.

Old patent application...

[Anonymous Coward]

This was requested back during the Courier development years, and filed in January of 2009. So no, there was no prior application or device on the market that did this. And it damn sure isn't a copy of the iPad. This headline is sensationalism at it's best.

Re:Have all the knowledgeable people left Microsof

[nmb3000]

I'm guessing that most of the intelligent, technically knowledgeable people have left Microsoft. So now non-technical employees are pretending to run a technological company.

Filing for patents like this has absolutely nothing to do with technical people. What probably happened is something like:

1. Engineer designs cool interface with gestures and page animations
2. He shows his project manager neat interface
3. Project manager like it, sends it up the chain to see what higher ups think
4. VP over section likes the idea, sends it to legal (like everything else) to make sure it won't be a problem
5. Legal drone sees no prior patent filings for the interface idea. Sends idea to his boss.
6. Legal over-drone notes no existing patents and thus automatically files a patent for the interface idea.
7. ???
8. Profit!

The software patents filed by a company have little or no bearing on the quality of the engineers working there.

One indication that the smart people have left is when a company brings out a new version of software, and the big change is in the menus. Menu changes are something people who don't care about technology can do.

You don't say?.

(The Microsoft Vista operating system was, it is said, not a failure, but an intentional method of getting people to pay for two operating systems, by deliberately releasing an unfinished one.)

Said by somebody who almost certainly never even ran Vista. Vista's real problems were:

• Hardware companies didn't want to adopt the new driver model (which they had years to plan for). Instead they released half-assed drivers, in part to make Microsoft look bad (for creating work for them).
• The huge amount of third-party software available for Windows was filled with poorly-designed programs that required users to be administrators. Microsoft pushed UAC and limited-user rights to try and get this to start changing. There was absolutely no way to make this any easier on people than they did.
• Vista did have higher hardware requirements than XP, and people were installing it expecting it to run well on their 256MB of RAM and Pentium 3. The "designed for Vista" logo/sticker just made things worse (and honestly, I think this is the biggest place Microsoft screwed up Vista. They should have been much clearer with regards to hardware requirements).

The way software patents work right now is every company is trying to get as many as possible. It's basically the Cold War all over again, except instead of nuclear weapons it's software patents. Microsoft is doing it for the same reasons Google, Apple, Palm, etc are: Mutual Assured Destruction.

Re:Spot the prior art

[Sethumme]

Prior Art? Here's the flash file from May 11, 2005: iparigrafika.hu at archive.org

Re:unique

[Gadget_Guy]

how does this differ from the ipad reader?

It differs by predating the iPad by over a year.

However, I don't think that it is prior art that will invalidate this patent. None of the examples that I have read here do so. Note to all: the headline is a lie! This is not about a simple transition animation.

What should invalidate this is that the whole idea is the most obvious use of a gesture interface ever! It looks like one of those simplistic examples they use in the introduction of a book on user interface design. Getting a patent is more than just being first to apply - you also have to have a non-obvious invention too. Unfortunately, the patent office is not known for understanding this.