Apple's multitouch pattent?

[Lars-Peter Clausen]

mathew davis wrote:
> Just wonderign if any body knows for sure if apple has a pattent on their
> multi touch technology.  check out this video on google.
>
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6379146923853181774&q=movie&hl=en
>
> Very impressive stuff.  I mean I am sure that this would probably be a 
> lot
> of processing for the neo, but just looking at the video there are so 
> many
> things that you can imagine you could do with this technology.  This 
> would
> be a perfect peice of technology for an open community.  If it is 
> pattented
> then I can't wait until someone else comes up with a similar 
> technology.  I
> counted that they had as many as 10 touches on the same panel at one 
> time.
> I wonder if they just use some kind of sectioning or something.  Any 
> way's I
> am just curious.  That and the voice control could change the way we
> interace with things.  I have always thought that the interface between
> human and machine has developed very slowly.  I mean the mouse and key 
> board
> have been around for ever and they are still the standard method of
> communicating with a machine.  Just thought I would post this question 
> here
> as every one here seems to be very knowledgable about this kind of thing.
Well, actually the video isn't directly connected to apple ( AFAIK - 
maybe they are cooperating with the author, or bought his technology).
The technology comes from a university ( or something like that ) 
project. See: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

There is also an opensource project implementing something similar: 
http://www.multi-touch.de/