Nokia's Lumia phones received one pretty cool feature with the WP8 GDR2 update, dubbed 'Amber' for all Lumia Smartphones. While right now, you can wake up the Nokia Glance screen app by hovering your finger near the screen, two new patents filed by Nokia could take touchless control to a whole new dimension. Here, read about both the patents for yourself and be the judge:
Hover based Text / object enlargement while reading or UI interaction. The letter or part of the word you hover on will get enlarged making it easy to read. This will also help in rendering touch inputs more easily.
Hover base handling of text input and icons. There will be three modes while using the keyboard to input text and once hover is done, the user enters into Zoom-pan mode from normal mode, where the part of text under hover gets zoomed in and also the text panning takes place based on movement of the hand. As soon as one touches the screen the device enters into pointing mode and hover interaction ceases. It may make text input really a breeze.
While the first patent talks about panning into whatever you're viewing on your display, the second patent wants to enable zooming and panning while using your camera app with your fingers, but without even touching your display. That sure is something new, something that we haven't heard of before (hence the patent, duh).
We'd love to see features like these implemented in future Lumia Smartphones with screens that are sensitive enough to register controls without a touch, wouldn't you?
|Source||Nokia Power User|
|Topics||Nokia, Patents, Lumia, Nokia Glance, Touchless Controls, Touchless Zooming, Touchless Panning|