Another day, another Apple tablet rumour. But this one comes with a juicy patent to go with it. Apple’s just resubmitted a patent devised by the brains behind the old-school hand-writing recognition enabled Apple Newton.
The patent, published yesterday, is rather boringly titled “Method and Apparatus for Acquiring and Organizing Ink Information in Pen-Aware Computer Systems”.
But despite its tedious title, it may offer a clear pointer to how an Apple tablet’s handwriting recognition could work.
One of the patent’s authors is Larry Yaeger who led the development team for the second generation of the Apple Newton (the one where the handwriting recognition actually worked). He told The Register that the patent is a reworking of a rejected portions from a patent filed in 2000 and awarded in July 2009.
The patent is extremely complex but essentially details a handwriting recognition method that identifies not only the pens strokes but the order and structure of those strokes.
Why would Apple include a pen based handwriting recognition system in the Apple tablet when it has thoroughly mastered the finger-based fun of multi-touch? The answer is likely to be precision – using a pen and multi-touch combined (like Wacom’s most recent graphics tablets) gives you the best of both worlds.
Apple has got a good history with handwriting recognition and Mac OS X is already ready to handle it with Inkwell (also partly developed by Yaeger) built-in. Is the Apple tablet going to make use of that? It’d certainly make sense.
TBA | TBA | Apple (via The Register)
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