Microsoft patents multi-gesture interactions for its exploding Live Tiles idea

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Remember the exploding Live tiles? A feature for Windows Phone which would allow users to quickly access shortcuts for a specific app right from their start screen. The feature was a great idea, and it was supposed to come with the now-dead McLaren device. Of course, Apple later implemented a similar feature called 3D Touch on the iPhone. Unfortunately though, the exploding live tiles never made it to Windows Phone which is quite sad.

Now, it turns out Microsoft patented the exploding Live Tiles as Mix View back in August 2014. The patent was published today, giving us a fairly technical idea of how the Mix View would work on Windows Phone. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we will be seeing Mix View in Windows 10 soon – however, there’s a chance of it coming to your Windows Phone in the future.

One of the figures from the patent suggests that users will be able to open the exploding Live Tiles using a multi-touch gesture. Basically, when you pinch out in a tile on the Start Screen, it will “explode” and show the shortcuts, which could be a quick action or a deep link into content associated with that application.

The Mix View idea is quite neat, to say the least. It isn’t yet clear why Microsoft decided to kill the idea, however. Of course, there’s a chance we will see this in a future version of Windows 10. However, for now, we just have the patents. Hopefully, Microsoft will bring this to Windows 10 in the coming months – or even years.

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