Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Jennifer A Teed

Reed L Townsend

Xiao Tu

Bryan Douglas Scott

Todd A Torset

Samir Shiraz Pradhan

Kenneth W Sykes

Erik Michael Geidl

Eric Christian Brown

David Abzarian

Gavin M Gear

Subha Bhattacharyay

Goran Predovic

Timothy H Kannapel

Jamie N Wakeam

Fei Su

Jerome J Turner

Todd M Landstad

Mudit Agrawal

Sebastian Poulose

Jen Anderson

Nidhi Sanghai

Roman Snystar

Erin Devoy

Maybelle Lippert

Bruce Edward James

Tu Xiao

The inertia system provides a common platform and application-programming interface (API) for applications to extend the input received from various multi-touch hardware devices to simulate real-world behavior of application objects. To move naturally, application objects should exhibit physical characteristics such as elasticity and deceleration. When a user lifts all contacts from an object, the inertia system provides additional manipulation events to the application so that the application can handle the events as if the user was still moving the object with touch. The inertia system generates the events based on a simulation of the behavior of the objects. If the user moves an object into another object, the inertia system simulates the boundary characteristics of the objects. Thus, the inertia system provides more realistic movement for application objects manipulated using multi-touch hardware and the API provides a consistent feel to manipulations across applications.

Multi-touch object inertia simulation

The techniques described herein are directed to a computing device that receives data from an indirect input device. The data received may indicate or signal that one or more objects are on or within a detection area of the indirect input device. For example, the data may indicate that one or more objects are in contact with a surface of an indirect touch device. The techniques include determining parameters for the one or more objects and analyzing the parameters to determine whether the data is directed to a touch operation or to a mouse operation. To perform the touch operation or the mouse operation, the techniques further describe converting the data received from a first coordinate space of the indirect input device to a second coordinate space of a display screen.

Disambiguation of indirect input

The manipulation system described herein provides a common platform and application-programming interface (API) for applications to communicate with various multi-touch hardware devices, and facilitates the interpretation of multi-touch input as one or more manipulations. Manipulations map more directly to user intentions than do individual touch inputs and add support for basic transformation of objects using multiple touch contacts. An application can use manipulations to support rotating, resizing, and translating multiple objects at the same time. The manipulation system outputs two-dimensional (2D) affine transforms that contain rotation, scale, and translation information. Thus, using the manipulation system the application author can focus more on building touch-capable applications and let the manipulation system handle the underlying transformations and communication with the multi-touch hardware.

Multi-touch manipulation of application objects

User inputs can indicate an intent of a user to target a location on a display. In order to determine a targeted point based on a user input, a computing device can receive an indication of at least one point, an indication of a width, and an indication of a height. The computing device can estimate a portion of the display based on the indication of the at least one point, the indication of the width, and the indication of the height. The computing device can also determine the targeted point based on a location of the at least one point and based on a location of a portion of one or more objects within the estimated portion of the display.

Touch intelligent targeting

An application programming interface instantiates an ink analyzer object that receives document data for a document containing electronic ink content from a software application hosting the document and running on a first processing thread. The ink analyzer object then employs the first thread to make a copy of the document data, provides the copy of the document data to an electronic ink analysis process, and returns control of the first processing thread to the analysis process. After the analysis process has analyzed the electronic ink, the ink analyzer object reconciles the results of the analysis process with current document data for the document.

Electronic ink processing and application programming interfaces

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Jennifer A Teed