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Comment by taligent | Hacker News Reader

In NONE of those cases did anybody use a pinch gesture to zoom anything.

So no. None of those legally count as prior art.

Well, you'll see what you want to see, I guess - but 50 seconds into http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo&feature=playe...

He makes a pinch gesture, and the circle on the CRT gets bigger and smaller. If that's not pinch to zoom, or the precursor to it, I don't know what is.

Which is the whole problem with Apple's case. They seem to like to pretend that they invented everything that's used on the iPhone, but this sort of research has been going on for decades.

update: I think the most striking thing about watching that pinch to zoom thing is that he's doing it idly while thinking/talking about something else - it's no big deal for him. I suspect that he's been using gestures like it for quite a while at that point.

You're right about one thing - you see what you want to see. I'd swear if asked that he's using his thumb and finger to draw a rectangle shape on the desk representing the keyboard he describes at the same time, but there's no denying the circle on the screen, even if just a shape bounding his touch points, rather than an object he selected and zoomed.

The later clip with the two fingered multitouch zoom of the person that recoiledsnake links to is more compelling, even if the gesture doesn't quite match that we know as pinch to zoom.

How different is "scaling" an image from "zooming" a browser page? Are they different at all? Because scaling a figure is exactly what Kruger demonstrates in the linked video at 4:30, as the other commenters have pointed out.

Furthermore, it looks like he may be using a touch surface in addition to IR/video cameras, because he can draw strokes on-screen with his finger while his whole silhouette is projected. (A capacitative touchscreen or not, I don't know. Maybe the cameras have good depth perception.) Let's not mince words, "pinching" is equivalent to moving two fingertips together, and "zooming" is scaling.

I also find striking the little crawling/flying sprite his silhouette plays with, starting at 3:34. We're seeing something that should be in a Kinect game, 20+ years before the Kinect. He speaks eloquently about how natural it is for humans to expect behaviours in the real world to translate to the virtual world, when they interact with images on a TV screen.

His exposition is full of so many casually demonstrated possibilities, each of which could probably be patented in our current environment. This guy (probably) didn't - leaving them open to free, public use - and we should be thankful for that.

Look in the 1998 video (http://youtube.com/watch?v=dmmxVA5xhuo) around 4:30. You could perhaps argue that's 'scaling' not 'zooming', but that's a very pedantic position, and not one I personally would entertain.

Direct link to the pinch to zoom part.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

So, tacking on a "BUT ON A CAPACITATIVE SCREEN" got Apple the patent?

Hardly. The screen on Buxton's multi-touch tablet in '85 was capacitive!

The patent system is so broken.

Devil's advocate: It is neigh impossible to judge from the video, but to me, the video shows less of a direct link between hand movement and what happens on the display. It is not as if the hand really grabs the screen. I also got the impression that he had to issue a command, chosen from the top of the screen (outside the video image) to switch from scaling to rotation. Another argument could be that this user does not actually seem to touch the screen (at least, that is my impression). It is likely that all these are due to technological limitations, but if I had to defend this as "not prior art" in court, I would try and work from those observations. There is little else to argue about, as a lot of the interactions are there, in a primitive (technologically) way.

In addition to the other examples, there's very clear one-handed pinch-to-scale at 6:30 in this video from 1991:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5772530828816089246

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