The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 25, 2003
Filed:
Aug. 31, 2000
Brett T. Ostrum, Edmonds, WA (US);
Gary Rensberger, Redmond, WA (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
A process for encoding the movement of a computer pointing device to better control a cursor or other object on a display. The process makes use of two assumptions relating to illegal transitions (skipped states) that enables information relating to such illegal transitions to be included in the encoding process that samples states of a waveform produced by a detector in the pointing device. The first assumption refers to the directional ambiguity of a skipped state. When examined logically, it can be determined that this directional ambiguity need not be a concern, because a pointing device moving fast enough so that states are missed is realistically unable to reverse direction so fast that subsequent samples of the waveform would miss the reversal. Therefore, if a state is skipped, it is a reasonable assumption to assign the direction to the skipped state determined from the preceding samples. The second assumption is that if each single state transition represents one unit of movement and sampling times are frequent enough such that it is unlikely that two adjacent states will be missed in the sampling, each illegal transition represents only a single missed state. Based on these assumptions, a lookup table that describes all possible state changes is incorporated into the encoding process, such that all sample data are combined with the prior directional and state data to determine a movement command output from the pointing device.