US 6,310,610 · Granted 2001-10-30

The Smart Touch Screen That Knew How Hard You Were Pressing

Imagine a phone screen that changes what happens when you touch it based on how wide or narrow your finger contact is—like how a paintbrush makes thicker or thinner strokes depending on the brush tip. This patent describes a system that detects the size and shape of what's touching the screen and triggers different functions accordingly.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a touch-responsive display system that measures the size of the contact object (like a finger or stylus) and activates different functions based on that measurement. What's protected here is the combination of sensing the pointer size and automatically invoking context-specific actions—whether that's drawing, erasing, dragging, or navigating—without the user having to switch tools or modes manually.

Why it matters

This patent arrives at a conceptual intersection that would later become central to smartphone and tablet design: the idea that a single touchscreen surface could intelligently interpret different types of input through contact geometry alone. While touchscreens existed before, the notion of making them 'aware' of what's touching them and responding contextually helped pave the way for the intuitive, gesture-rich interfaces we expect today. For Nortel, this represented a play into the emerging personal computing space in the late 1990s.

Real-world use

When you use a stylus versus your finger on a tablet drawing app and the interface behaves differently, that distinction traces back to ideas like those in this patent.

Original USPTO abstract

The system and method consistent with the present invention provides a touch-responsive graphical user interface for electronic devices. The graphical user interface determines a pointer size of the object making contact with a display and activates a function corresponding to the pointer size. The graphical user interface may invoke a wide array of functions such as a navigation tool, draw function, an erase function, or a drag function. The graphical user interface of the present invention may be especially useful in portable electronic devices with small displays.

Patent details

Publication number: US 6,310,610
Filing date: 1997-12-04
Grant date: 2001-10-30
Assignee: Nortel Networks Limited
Inventor(s): BEATON BRIAN FINLAY, SMITH COLIN DONALD, BLOUIN FRANCOIS, COMEAU GUILLAUME, CRADDOCK ARTHUR JULIAN PATTERSON
CPC class: G06F3/0488

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