New Apple patent filing reveals plans for ten-finger multi-touch input device

Patent applications from Apple are a dime a dozen, but this one's particularly intriguing: imagine a contoured touch-sensitive surface that lets you type, swipe, and tap using all ten of your fingers at once, including the ability to use fingers on both hands to twirl or stretch a 2-D document, like a photo. Are we getting a peek at how the rumored iTablet might work?

AppleInsider has the scoop on the "massive" patent application, which was filed in June 2009—relatively recently, as far as patent filings go.

The Apple document goes into exhaustive detail on how the proposed multi-touch system, which would be able to detect taps and swipes from all 10 fingers at once, would work. Among other features, the touch-sensitive surface would be able to determine when you're actively tapping and swiping versus when you're just resting your fingers or palms on the input surface, according to AppleInsider.

Apple's proposed 10-finger input device isn't without precedent, of course. As The Unofficial Apple Weblog points out, the big brains behind "Star Trek: The Next Generation" had something like it in mind when they designed the awesome touchscreen control panels on the bridge of the Enterprise. (I can still picture Commander Data accessing the Starfleet database, his fingers—all ten of them—flying across the input screen at light speed. Now that was cool.)

And let's not forget Microsoft Surface, the touch-sensitive tabletop that lets you type, tap, twirl, and draw with all 10 of your fingers at once. It's a cool concept, and a handful of Surface machines were eventually deployed to various hotels and retail stores, but the system is so bulky—it requires five motion-detecting cameras mounted beneath a touch-sensitive display, not to mention a full-on Windows-powered CPU—that it isn't practical as a consumer device, much less a portable gadget.

Of course, like all patent applications, Apple's latest filing is really just academic until it sees the light of day in a shipping product. Now ... might that product be the hotly anticipated, much-whispered-about (and still totally unconfirmed) iTablet? You never know, but the system described here sure seems like a perfect fit for a 10-inch  touchscreen tablet device, although I'm not sure how the contoured shape detailed in the patent filing would work with a stiff touchpad. (Then again, that's why I'm not a hardware designer.)

Or another possibility: perhaps this is Apple's idea of the desktop iMac touchpad of the future, which would eliminate the mouse and the physical keyboard altogether (although that might constitute throwing the baby out with the bathwater).

Related:
Evidence of Apple's tablet-like input interface reappears [AppleInsider]