Nokia S60 Phones Could Feature 3D Touchless Control

Since Apple released its multi-touch controlled iPhone, the touchscreen technology has been adopted by many other important mobile manufacturers and it's set to become a standard feature in couple of years. Therefore, Nokia wants to implement the technology in its handsets too, and it will, as back in October 2007 it announced the innovation of the Symbian S60 software with intuitive touch user interface and other useful features. The improved S60 interface, said to be available from 2008, aroused the interest of both Nokia fans and mobile users in general.

Recently, a patent filed by Nokia in June 2007 surfaced, showing that the Finnish company is in fact preparing more than we've imagined until now. The next generation S60 mobile phones will come, as announced, with multi-touch user interface and, according to the above mentioned patent, they could also feature 3D touchless control.

This 3D touchless control concept might sound a bit vague, but the filed patent is pretty clear about what Nokia wants to do: allowing users to control handsets without touching them. The new technology relies on Ultrasonic Transducers (or USTs) that emit high frequency sound waves, so, when a user gestures in front of the device, the waves are sent back to command the device's functions. Of course, there will be pre-set gestures and finger combinations for every command, for example a user can simply use the pick-up gesture to select an icon, or make the "C" letter with a finger for the phone's Calendar to be launched. In order to make everything easy, virtual pointers are shown on the handset's display, to indicate the position of your finger(s). All this will surely change the way we interact with mobile devices, and it looks like the future as seen in Sci-Fi movies is closer than we think.

An interesting fact about the Nokia patent is that the device sketched in the pictures doesn't really look like a Nokia phone, but rather like an early (hence obsolete) Palm handset. I couldn't say why is that, but Nokia knows better what it's doing, right?

While the multi-touch interface is ready to be integrated in Nokia's S60 phones, the 3D touchless control concept is just a patent application, only an idea, so it will take a while until it becomes reality. And speaking of reality, I can't help thinking that for some people it's still hard to get used with the touchscreen and they prefer the classical keypad, so probably the 3D touchless control will be much harder to get used to. But I guess we'll learn, the same way older generations learned to get used with the PC mouse and all the other things that were once innovative and are now part of the every-day life.