Google's Engineers have taken Larry Page's vision of taking Moon Shots a little too seriously. The Patent Figure that you see above is from one of Google's patent titled, "Touch-Screen Keyboard Facilitating Touch Typing with Minimal Finger Movement." The core of the patent is about a "keyboard operation module that generates geometric shapes for display on a touch-screen display, each geometric shape corresponding to a respective finger of a user." Google first understood that "switching to a more efficient type of a touch-screen keyboard may require too much learning time from a user to justify a switch." Then they deliberately went forward and invented this wacky V-shaped keyboard that's an ergonomic nightmare. But hey, it's a Moon Shot and that will make Google's leader happy. Go Figure.
From an Intellectual Property stand point there are a number of races going on in techland on many fronts. There's the race to find the next generation smart pen, there's a race to bring smart eyewear to market and there's even a two horse race to bring gesture-based search to market in the not-too-distant future between Google and Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft has filed a new patent application with the US Patent Office covering gesture-based search that could extend to smartphone, tablets, the Xbox, tiltable desktop multitouch displays, next generation Ultrabook convertibles and more. Our cover graphic covers patent FIGS. 12A-12E as basic examples of specific gestures being considered. The dot shown in the bottom center example, for instance, has an added value that indicates that the search query should weight a particular world or term more heavily. While Google's 2012 patent filing shows that they have a substantial lead over Microsoft's Bing team in this area of gesture-based searches, I wouldn't count Microsoft out of this race just yet. In fact Macites may even welcome the new features in the future.
