This Apple Touchscreen Patent Can Figure Out When You Get Mad At Your iPhone

Apple has applied for a patent on a technique that lets iPhone touchscreens detect the difference between different kinds of touches.

You know, the difference between a patient, light tap and the angry slamming of the finger.

Apple Insider explains that the patent covers a combination of "capacitative" touch and infrared light sensing that would let a phone determine how hard a user is pressing down on the screen.

The patent, which was filed in 2012, uses "Frustrated Total Internal Reflection" as well as "Capacitive Sensing" to sense tell how much force is being exerted on the screen. FTIR uses infrared transmit lines, and CS can tell where the touch takes place. The transmitters and receivers would hide under the screen without affecting the aesthetics of the phone at all.

All of this is to say that touchscreens could be getting much cooler, offering users a range of different control gestures on a phone.

You can imagine how game designers might utilize the new range of touches to differentiate the aggressiveness of players during a game.

And it might help alert app developers to flaws in their user interfaces - to many hard, repeated taps is often a sign that a user can't get an app to work the way he or she wants.