What about imaginary tech that's appeared in films?
Minority Report clearly shows a two finger zoom out on a photo way back in 2002:
The patent is ONLY about SCROLLING a section WITHIN a page, and using a DIFFERENT NUMBER of fingers to SCROLL the whole page.
Example: a scrollable Google map inside a scrollable webpage.
Of course, if you allow one finger to do both, you do not infringe.
Interesting. I had never encountered such touch gestures before in any other context. It was always point and click and nothing else.
That's been pretty much true of mass consumer devices.
There are other touch fields, such as industrial control interfaces, which extensively use virtual knobs, sliders, and other touch objects. Touch gesture vocabulary was a major topic for us in those areas a decade or two ago.
So those other companies back in the '90s patented all these multi-touch gestures, right?
Years ago, everyone shared their ideas freely. Most developers would simply have thought that such easy-to-invent gestures were unpatentable.
Some did so, though. For instance, Apple's patent cites
this patent predating theirs, which includes in its description, actions such as:
"If the user contacts the touch surface with a pair of fingers simultaneously over an application window displayed on the touch surface and the fingers are closely and generally horizontally spaced, the driver recognizes the simultaneous finger contacts as a scroll gesture and injects a scroll event into the application.
Pointer position data conveyed to the application by the driver in response to subsequent vertical movement of the fingers is interpreted by the application either as scroll up or scroll down commands."
Another older patent referenced in Apple's patent has a claim for using multiple fingers to cause scrolling when more than one touch is seen:
"... scrolling or panning is performed when the at least two unique identifiers move together in substantially the same direction"
So multitouch scrolling is well known, as is single scrolling cited in other patent references. In fact, the whole point of multitouch is give the user more gestures options.
I think someone at Apple noticed that no one had patented scrolling using a
combination of single and multi for contained frames, and took advantage of past R&D friendliness and today's overburdened patent system, IMO.
