Late last week, we highlighted a pair of Apple patent applications offering details on the company’s implementation of its “Touch ID” fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 5s. The highly technical patent applications showed how the system works and revealed that Apple first moved to protect the ideas with the filing of several provisional patent applications in May 2012.
A third Touch ID-related patent application filed by Apple also quietly surfaced last week (via Unwired View) but has flown under the radar until now because it appears to have published on the World Intellectual Property Organization’s database but not the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s database.
This third patent application is the most revealing yet with regard to Touch ID, showing how Apple has envisioned expanding the feature to incorporate trackpad functionalities, tracking movements of a user’s finger or thumb over the sensor to navigate through user interfaces on the device’s screen. In one example, Apple shows how a user moving his or her finger right to left across the Touch ID home button could pan a map, with a subsequent upward movement across the home button triggering activation of a multitasking interface.
Panning a map — For more information read the original article here.
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