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 Displays have vastly increased the number and variety of smart hand-held devices with information displays. Such devices now include smartphones and a variety of hand-held computers (PDA), GPS devices and others. Today's smart hand held devices utilize advanced processors, a large amount of internal memory, wireless communication capabilities and active LCD displays with extremely bright backlit screens that can be viewed from almost any angle.

The display's SIZE will always remain small due to the limitations inherent to the 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. Many of the newer smartphones also employ touch screen controls. These approaches require cumbersome, two-hand 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 a flat button.

The RotoView™ Approach

RotoView technology has a unique Navigation mode. During Navigation mode, the hand-held small display navigates the large stored virtual display in response to changes in orientation at which the device is held. In particular, it allows the user to navigate a large 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 online RotoView animation. (Note: File size is about 2MB)
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.

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 provides several alternate choices of sensors and various protocol options to switch between Navigation and Fixed modes.

1. Non-linear relation between the amount of tilt or hand movement and the amount (or rate) of view navigation.
2. This non linear relation further changes dynamically during the navigation process.

While in Navigation mode, response to the re-orientations of the device may change dynamically. For example, at the start of the navigation, the response is fairly coarse to bring the display to the general area. After 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.

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 vertical hand gesture. Both of these activation options are well suited for single hand operation.

Summary of RotoView Features and Benefits

• Allows users to view relatively large virtual documents (e.g. web pages, maps, spreadsheets) in mobile units with small-sized displays, and provides seamless switching between navigation and fixed modes, using a single hand.
• 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.
• RotoView-enabled devices provide "high tech" sophistication and feeling to users, thus enhancing the appeal of the device.
• Can be implemented within the device's operating systems and enhance all other applications running on the device. Acceleremoters have been recently incorporated within smartphones for other activities. This existing resources may be used with RotoView for view navigation.
• 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 (like streaming video that will dominate future hand-held devices) or using large maps.
• 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.

Back To Home Page