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INNOVENTIONS' RotoView® - The Intuitive Display Navigation Solution for Hand Held Devices

Background and Problem Definition

Customer demand for information and entertainment on the go, combined with the rapid miniaturization of complex electronic circuits and the emergence of high-resolution active TFT Liquid Crystal and OLED displays have vastly increased the number and variety of smart hand-held devices with information displays. Such devices now include smartphones, gaming devices and a variety of hand-held computers, GPS based maps and others. In addition to the great active displays that can be viewed from almost any angle, these devices also utilize advanced processors and a large amount of internal memory.

The main limitation with hand held devices is the display's small size. It will always remain small due to the hand held device's small form factor. This fact leads to the challenge of displaying large amounts of complex information on a small screen. An additional challenge is to enable single-hand operation of the device.

Mobile devices like the smartphone in Fig.1 use a variety of scrolling switches (resembling a sort of flat joystick) or track balls. Most of the newer smartphones employ touch screen controls. These approaches require cumbersome, two-hand operation. Touch screen controls may cause unintended activation of a selection during a scrolling operation. INNOVENTIONS' patented RotoView technology was developed to address this problem and to provide intuitive, single-hand view navigation for hand-held devices.

Fig. 1. Current smartphones scroll with touch screen or a flat button.

The RotoView® Solution

RotoView "tilt and scroll" technology has a unique Navigation mode. The large stored virtual display is navigated by the user during Navigation mode in response to changes in orientation at which the device is held. In particular, it allows the user to navigate a large, constantly updating display in all directions.

The following example illustrates how a relatively large virtual display is navigated during Navigation mode.

Fig. 2. Stored Virtual Display.

Figure 2 shows the entire stored virtual display of a picture to be viewed by the hand-held device. Of course, it is assumed that the picture cannot fit the smaller size display of the hand-held device and the trivial solution of reducing the size will result in a picture too small to be viewed. Using the RotoView protocol, the hand-held device is entered into the Navigation mode. During Navigation mode, the user first rotates the device to the left (Fig. 3A) and then rotates to the right to see beyond the right boundary of the display (Fig. 3B).

Fig. 3A	Fig. 3B

At any time, the user can exit Navigation mode to fix the display (the Fixed mode), resume Navigation mode and continue to rotate the device to the right to view the remainder of the stored picture, as shown in Fig. 3C. Display navigation can occur in all directions, depending on the user's hand tilt.

		Please click here to view our original RotoView animation. Newer technology deployment is shown here.
Fig. 3C

Another example of RotoView's operation is in view magnification. Fig. 4A shows a regular display which may contain too much information for the user to view conveniently on such a small display. By commanding the unit to magnify the display and activating the Navigation mode (Fig. 4B), the user can navigate the enlarged display at his convenience.

Fig. 4A. Information is too small to view in the display.   Fig. 4B. Once the display is magnified, the user can navigate it with RotoView.

RotoView Strategic Patents

The RotoView technology and strategic patents gained major publicity starting in the early part of this decade. In addition to numerous editorial mentions, INNOVENTIONS spent significant marketing efforts to bring the RotoView idea to the attention of the major manufacturers of hand-held devices. Therefore, the reader of this document should not be confused as to the originality and novelty of the RotoView patents when noticing that most of today's hand held devices already include the accelerometer (or other sensor) to sense the orientation.

The RotoView patents strategic prominence stem from the fact that they are highly cited, as described in this patent citation analysis.

RotoView Implementation

It is important that the entire operation of RotoView will be intuitive and therefore easy to use, and yet be implemented at a low cost. RotoView can use any tilt sensor that may already be built in the hand held device. It utilizes various smart protocols and view navigation algorithms to switch between Navigation and Fixed modes.

Choice of Orientation Sensors

RotoView technology can work with any orientation sensor that is available in today's hand held devices. These include the following sensors:

1. Accelerometers, which are typically silicon-based MEMS sensors.
2. Gyroscopes, which are also based on MEMS technology.
3. Camera-based tilt sensors which determine orientation based on changes between captured images.
4. Magnetic sensors that detect orientation changes relative to Earth's magnetic field.
5. Gravity based mechanical sensors.

Smart Protocols and View Navigation Algorithms

RotoView provides several protocol options to switch between Navigation and Fixed modes. In addition to the use of a switch or touch screen command to activate Navigation mode, RotoView may activate Navigation mode by tapping on the enclosure of the hand held device. Another embodiment activates the Navigation mode by a specific hand gesture. Both of these activation options are well suited for single hand operation.

The proprietary RotoView Non-linear Dynamic Response (NLDR) algorithms determine the amount of view navigation in response to the tilt and movement of the hand held device.

The NLDR algorithms exhibit the following main features:

1. Response curves providing Non-linear relation between the amount of tilt or hand movement and the amount (or rate) of view navigation.
2. Selection of different stored response curves for use by different applications.
3. The response curves may further change dynamically during the navigation process.

While in Navigation mode, response to the re-orientations of the device may change dynamically as mentioned above. For example, at the start of the navigation, the response is fairly coarse to bring the display to the general area. After a few seconds within Navigation mode, the response automatically becomes more refined, to allow exact placement of the display. As a result, RotoView does not require an exact correlation between orientation changes and actual navigation of the display, which allows the use of relatively low cost coarse sensors to determine the orientation changes.

Additional information regarding the NLDR algorithm is available here.

Additional issues relating to the user interface experience with RotoView are detailed here.

Summary of RotoView Features and Benefits

• Allows users to view relatively large virtual documents (e.g. web pages, maps, photos, spreadsheets) in mobile units with small-sized displays, and provides seamless switching between navigation and fixed modes, using a single hand operation.

• RotoView technology can be integrated with mechanical tilt sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, camera-based tilt sensors, and all other orientation sensors available in today's hand held devices.

• Dynamically changing correlation between orientation changes and display navigation to accommodate the user's natural and intuitive hand control movements.

• Combines efficient image navigation with image magnification.

• Can be quickly implemented within the device's operating systems and enhance all other applications running on the device. Acceleremoters have been recently incorporated within smartphones for automatic "portrait/landscape" orientation detection. These existing resources may be used with RotoView for view navigation by simply adding the software driver.

• By using solid-state sensor technology that does not need to be precise (the RotoView software algorithm "improves" upon sensor measurements), RotoView can be integrated with mobile systems at a relatively low cost.

• RotoView is the fastest method to navigate the display and is therefore a must when navigating rapidly changing displays for gaming applications or using large maps.

• RotoView-enabled devices provide "high tech" sophistication and feeling to users, thus enhancing the appeal of the device.

• RotoView has the potential to impact the mobile device technology for a long time by becoming a de-facto standard feature, similar to the impact of the standard mouse on desktop systems. In particular, RotoView navigation is well suited to enhance today's multi-touch user interface.

RotoView is covered by US Patents 6,466,198 and 6,933,923 and European patent EP1290672 in the UK, France, Germany, and Italy. For more information, please contact Scott LaRoche, 1-281-879-6226, scott@innoventions.com.

INNOVENTIONS® Inc. "INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS FROM INVENTIVE MINDS" ©2010 INNOVENTIONS, INC.
All rights reserved. RotoView and INNOVENTIONS are registered trademarks of INNOVENTIONS, Inc.