Several Apple patent applications were released today by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Two are particularly interesting.

The first is labeled “Multi-dimensional scroll wheel“. Filed in September of last year it describes the familiar iPod click wheel but witht the capability of multi-touch. Here’s an excerpt:

To improve the effectiveness of a touch-based scroll wheel, the present disclosure provides multi-touch scroll wheel circuitry capable of sensing input in multiple ways. For example, scroll wheel circuitry can sense a moving object, such as a finger, as it is moved not only in a rotational manner but also in a linear manner across the center of the scroll wheel. The scroll wheel circuitry can also sense more than one object at a time, such as multi-finger touch or motion. In this manner, the scroll wheel circuitry can enable a device to recognize a wider range of input. To be clear, a wheel can be circular, but can also have any shape that enables a closed loop type input.

The go as far as to suggest this new multi-touch click wheel could be used as a stand alone device similar to a mouse, or even built into a notebook.

The second patent worth mentioning today regards media sharing while on a call on the iPhone. This patent entitled “Methods and systems for mixing media with communications“, and describes several methods for sharing media during a current running communications connection. Here’s an excerpt from this application:

The present invention permits a user to initiate a communications operation with a recipient, or to receive a communications operation initiated by another individual, and to transmit a selected media item over the same communication path used for the communications operation without terminating the communications operation. This combined transmission can occur regardless of the type of media selected by the user to be added to the communications operation.

This application also makes reference to video conferencing which of course is not available in any of Apple’s current mobile device offerings which at least proves Apple is looking into video conferencing and other video capabilities.

I don’t know about you, but none of these come as a tremendous shock to me. Apple will need new ways to entice buyers to it’s lower end iPod sales, and what better way to do that than bring a buzzword like “multi-touch” to an iPod?

Also, I believe media sharing if not full blow video conferencing is a feature that will show up on the iPhone in a matter of time. Will it be here next week at WWDC? I strongly doubt it, but in future iteration? Yes.

Images courtesy of United States Patent and Trademark Office