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In this decision, the European Patent Office did not grant a patent on the concept of a three-dimensional motion graphical user interface. Here are the practical takeaways of the decision T 2371/17 (Animated 3D-GUI/SAMSUNG) of 7.7.2020 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.5.05:

Key takeaways

The invention

This European patent application relates to a three-dimensional motion graphical user interface (MGUI).

Compared to conventional two-dimensional GUIs, which are flat and static, three-dimensional GUIs are multi-level and dynamic, according to the application. When communicating information to a user, the three-dimensional GUI is advantageous in that it is more visual and pleasing to the user. However, occasionally, a two-dimensional GUI is said to be more effective than a three-dimensional GUI. For example, in the case of text, a larger amount of information can be communicated in a two-dimensional plane, and it is easier for the user to read information using the two-dimensional GUI.

According to the patent application, in the conventional three-dimensional user interface, three-dimensional information and two-dimensional information cannot be displayed such that the three-dimensional information and the two-dimensional information can be dynamically associated with each other.

The application formulates its aim as to provide a three-dimensional motion graphical user interface capable of effectively displaying information and pleasing to a user and an apparatus and a method of providing the same.

Here is how the invention is defined in claim 1:

Is it technical?

The first-instance examining division had refused the patent application based on lack of inventive step.

The board of appeal based its inventive-step assessment on a document that describes a graphical user interface which displays headlines of news stories on a polyhedral graphical object. By clicking on one of the faces of the polyhedral object, the corresponding news story is displayed in full in a pop-up window under the corresponding headline.

Claim 1 essentially differed from this prior art by displaying second information on a projected surface using projection effects. Here is how the board considered this difference:

With respect to the other features of claim 1, the board agrees with the findings of the examining division that the identified distinguishing feature of displaying the second information on a projected surface using projection effects represents a mere presentation of information. An association between the first and second displayed information, as claimed, is achieved in D3 by having the same headline displayed on the selected face of the polyhedral object and in the pop-up window, which can both be viewed by the user.

It thus remained to be seen whether the projection effects achieved a technical effect over the prior art:

All the effects that the appellant considers to be achieved by the projection effects actually rely on the user’s preferences and do not contribute to any technical effect and/or are already achieved by the method of D3. In particular, guiding the user’s eyes from the selected face to the projected surface, as well as a one-to-one correspondence, is clearly achieved in D3 when the large pop-up window having the same headline (72, Figure 9) appears above the polyhedral object (60, Figure 9) showing the selected face in a prominent position. A definitive advantage of the eye guiding provided by the projection effects over the eye guiding achieved by D3 could only rely on the user’s preferences and thus cannot confer a technical character to the projection effects. The appellant has further argued that using projection effects would save space on the projected surface and thus enable this surface to display more second information, in contrast to the pop-up window in D3 that must display the headline in addition to the second information. However, in the board’s view, the projection effects themselves take up space on the display and thus limit the size of the projected surface and by consequence the display space dedicated to the second information.

Therefore, claim 1 of the main request was found not to involve an inventive step.

Concerning auxiliary request II, the appellant argued that the projection effects provide a small time delay which provides the user with a comfortable amount of time to move their eyes from focusing on the polyhedron object to focusing on the second information on the projected surface. However, the board noted:

The board first notes that no such time delay is defined in claim 1 or even mentioned in the description. Second, the property that a time delay to move the eyes is “comfortable” or not for a user is heavily dependent on the user’s preferences and cannot be related to a technical effect.

In auxiliary request V, the appellant tried to define an animation on the graphical user interface upon the user selecting a face of the polyhedral object. Also this did not convince the board:

The board agrees in substance with the examining division that the effects of this animation are of an aesthetic nature and relate to psychological and cognitive aspects of the human user such that the animation features do in fact merely represent a presentation of information. Moreover, opening a face of a three-dimensional icon is a well-known feature in the field of graphical user interfaces, as illustrated by D4 (see Figures 9A and 9B). The appellant has argued that a technical effect of this animation is to better attract the visual attention of the user. In the board’s view, this effect depends mainly on the user’s preferences and does not represent a technical effect on which an inventive step argument can be based.

In the end, none of the requests were found to involve a non-obvious technical contribution, and thus the appeal was dismissed.

More information

You can read the whole decision here: T 2371/17 (Animated 3D-GUI/SAMSUNG) of 7.7.2020

Patrick Heckeler

Patrick is a European patent attorney at BARDEHLE PAGENBERG. He specializes in software patents in Europe both from a prosecution and litigation point of view.

www.bardehle.com/team/detail/heckeler-patrick.html

In this decision, the European Patent Office did not grant a patent on the concept of presenting clinical statistics to help identify previous similar medical cases. It gives an concise summary of the test for assessing whether an invention falls into the “presentation of information” exclusion. Here are the practical takeaways of the decision T 1091/17 (Clinical statistics/PHILIPS) of 4.6.2020 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.5.05:

Key takeaways

The invention

This European patent application relates to searching for case-based decision support in medical applications.

Case-based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) known from the prior art can assist physicians by identifying previous cases that have been diagnosed and treated, and are similar to the case under evaluation. According to the application, current case-based CDSS systems mostly present similar cases based on only image-based information and fail to incorporate patient medical history, which plays an important role in the diagnostic process. Moreover, previously known systems lack transparency as to why certain cases are retrieved.

Here is how the invention is defined in claim 1:

Is it technical?

The first-instance examining division had refused the patent application based on lack of inventive step.

The board of appeal based its inventive-step assessment on a document which disclosed an iterative method for querying medical images in a database in which initial queries are refined in subsequent iterations or interactive “loops”. The board agreed with the appellant that this document did not disclose calculating statistics on the basis of clinical information associated with the set of similar images, presenting these statistics to the user and receiving subsequent user input based on these statistics.

The appellant emphasized the fact that claim 1 presents the calculated statistics together with the set of similar cases. In the appellant’s view, the case law consistently distinguished between what is presented to the user (statistics) and how it is presented (together with the set of similar cases). Since, in this case, presenting the statistics together with the similar cases involved how the information is presented rather than what is presented, it was not a presentation of information as such.

Here’s how the board responded:

The board is aware of a few exceptional decisions of the boards of appeal (see T 1749/06, point 4.1.3, second sentence; T 651/12, page 16, first full sentence) expressing the view that the reference to “presentations of information” in Article 52(2)(d) EPC was meant to relate exclusively to the cognitive content of the presented information (“what is presented”) and not to the manner in which it is presented (“how it is presented”). Nevertheless, this view has not been adopted by the mainstream case law in the course of legal development (cf. G 3/08, Headnote 4). The predominant view in the case law is what T 1235/07 (see point 11) calls the “wider view”, according to which both what is presented and how it is presented are considered to be “presentations of information” (see T 1143/06, points 3.4, 3.5 and 5.4; T 1741/08, point 2.1.10; T 1214/09, point 4.8.1; T 1562/11, point 2.7, last paragraph; T 1802/13, page 10, first full paragraph).

This view has also been adopted by the European Patent Office for its practice (see Guidelines for Examination in the European Patent Office, November 2019 edition, G-II.3.7).

Therefore, the appellant’s argument that the distinguishing features do not relate to presentations of information does not convince the board.

The board also commented on the relevant test for identifying whether an invention relates to a presentation of information “as such”:

Irrespective of whether an invention relates to “what is presented” or “how it is presented”, the test suggested in the case law to judge whether a presentation of information might exceptionally (see T 1741/08, point 3.3, last paragraph) contribute to the technical character of the invention is to assess whether it credibly assists the user in performing a technical task by means of a continued and guided human-machine interaction process (see T 336/14, Headnote and T 1802/13, page 10, second full paragraph).

A prerequisite for this test is the proper formulation of the technical task performed by the user. The appellant referred in its written submissions to a “medical task”. This level of generality would not be sufficient since not every task performed in medicine is a technical task. Indeed an example given by the appellant (“if the statistics, e.g. show that seven out of eight retrieved cases belong to patients with cancer, then the user can derive that the case under evaluation might have something to do with cancer”) illustrates this point. The example implies that the alleged technical task is a diagnostic task. However, besides technical tasks carried out mainly in the examination phase involving the collection of data, diagnosis involves tasks of a predominantly non-technical nature such as the deductive decision phase, which is a purely intellectual exercise (see G 1/04, point 6.4.1). The “medical task” in the appellant’s example relates to the purely intellectual deductive decision phase and therefore cannot be accepted as a technical task.

The appellant then argued, in analogy to T 643/00 (see Catchword, second sentence), that searching and retrieving medical cases stored in a database was the relevant technical task. The board could accept this as a suitable formulation. The question to be answered then is whether the invention credibly assists the user in performing this technical task by means of a continued and guided human-machine interaction process.

Here the appellant argued that the presentation of the calculated statistics together with the set of similar cases assisted the user, typically a physician, in performing the technical task of searching for a medical case more efficiently and reliably. This provided helpful information to guide the physician in concentrating their search and thus obtaining the desired case more quickly, which was a technical effect. The appellant also argued that the mere fact that mental activities on the user’s part were involved did not necessarily render this effect non-technical.

But the board did not agree:

This argumentation relies heavily on the wording of T 643/00, point 17, but removes it from its proper context. The borrowed wording is preceded by the following text: “the functions/steps of processing the images in a specific format, i.e. a predetermined plural number of images in a side-by-side manner at a low level of resolution, and allowing selection and display of an image at higher resolutions [provide information to the the user in the form of a technical tool for an intellectual task he has to master]”. It is thus clear that the deciding board in T 643/00 did not give a carte blanche for deeming technical any information that supports a user in performing a technical task (see also T 1741/08, point 2.1.12, “not everything that supports a technical task has itself a technical character”). It made this statement for the very specific case of a particular display technique defined in terms of an objective technical criterion, namely image resolution. This has also been the common understanding in subsequent case law (see e.g. T 1741/08, point 2.1.13; T 336/14, point 1.2.6; T 581/14, point 16.19). The effect of image resolution on the user is an objective physiological effect which can qualify as a credible technical effect (see T 1442/16, point 1.8, last paragraph), unlike the effect of presenting clinical statistics in the case in hand, which relies on a chain broken by semantic or cognitive processing (see T 1741/08, point 2.1.6). Therefore, T 643/00 does not help the appellant’s case.

The appellant was not able to convince the board that the distinguishing features of claim 1 of the main request produced a technical effect. Therefore, claim 1 of the main request does not involve an inventive step (Article 56 EPC).

Also the auxiliary requests filed by the appellant did not change this assessment, so that the appeal was eventually dismissed.

More information

• You can read the whole decision here: T 1091/17 (Clinical statistics/PHILIPS) of 4.6.2020
• Guidelines for Examination, G-II-3.7 (Presentations of information)

Patrick Heckeler

Patrick is a European patent attorney at BARDEHLE PAGENBERG. He specializes in software patents in Europe both from a prosecution and litigation point of view.

www.bardehle.com/team/detail/heckeler-patrick.html

In this decision, the European Patent Office did not grant a patent on the concept of displaying an appointment request and its surrounding appointments in a mini-calendar format to avoid that the user has to switch to the calendar module. Here are the practical takeaways of the decision T 1750/13 (Scheduling opportunity previewer/Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC) of 1.10.2019 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.5.01:

Key takeaways

The invention

This European patent application relates to a previewer which displays a request to add a new appointment or meeting to the user’s calendar which takes account of the surrounding appointments in the user’s calendar. The preview is displayed in a “mini-calendar format” which is a miniature view of the user’s calendar in the user’s current context. The “mini-calendar format” shows conflicting and/or adjacent appointments:

The invention allows a user to make a decision on how to handle a request for a new appointment, e.g. to accept, decline, propose new time, without having to switch the “context”, in other words, the user does not have to open their calendar module in order to make this decision.

Here is how the invention is defined in claim 1:

Is it technical?

The first-instance examining division had refused the patent application based on a lack of inventive step. In the summons to oral proceedings, the board expressed a preliminary view that the refusal was justified. In the decision, the board points out:

In order to make an informed decision, any kind of scheduling and planning activity requires a user to have information at hand about appointments in his or her calendar which are potentially conflicting or surrounding the new appointment. In the Board’s judgement this information and its provision simply form part of an administrative or business scheme and a presentation of information. The features of claim 1 of receiving a proposed scheduling opportunity or appointment (feature i), retrieving the context of one or more surrounding appointments [from the user’s calendar] (feature ii) and displaying the result (feature iii) to the user in a specific format [for allowing it to make a decision about whether to accept or decline the new appointment] are a computer implementation of this scheme.

The established approach for dealing with mixed-type inventions is the “COMVIK approach” (T 641/00 – Two identities / COMVIK), according to which the non-technical features cannot contribute to inventive step.

The issue in this appeal is thus whether the above mentioned scheme has any technical features or effects. If not, then claim 1 of the main request is merely a straightforward implementation of the scheme on a general purpose computer, which would not involve an inventive step.

One argument of the appellant was that the claimed “previewer system” was a technical feature. The board, however, did not follow this argument:

The Board notes that in text processing, previewing a document means displaying it on a screen instead of, or prior to, printing it. The purpose is to inform a user about the look of a document, whether the formatting is correct, thereby avoiding the waste of paper. In other fields, a preview of information is a visualisation of a subset of information, such as a summary of the content of a book on a book cover, of selected fields of its bibliographic data. The purpose is to inform a person about a book without obliging him to read its full content.

In the Board’s judgement, both are a mere presentation of information which does not lead to a technical effect and therefore does not have technical character.

Secondly, the appellant argued that a “mini-calendar format” should be regarded as technical feature:

The feature “mini-calendar format” refers to a miniature view of the user’s calendar in the user’s current context, see paragraph [0020]. It is employed in the application to limit the information to be displayed to those appointments which are in conflict or which are close to the proposed appointment. However, in the context of scheduling appointments, which is an administrative activity, a user evidently only needs to consider the “surrounding” and “conflicting” appointments, other appointments are not relevant for him to decide. In the Board’s view, a requirement for describing what a user wants to see is a non-technical rule or scheme and its arrangement on a display resulting in a “mini-calendar” format is a mere presentation of information.

The appellant had also argued that displaying the “scheduling opportunity” in a mini-calendar format with the context of surrounding appointments achieved three technical effects:

1. it saved time and resources because only a minimum number of surrounding appointments needed to be retrieved
2. it improved user-friendliness and usability because the context of surrounding appointments for a “scheduling opportunity” was retrieved
3. it saved resources because a user did not need to open a separate calendar

But also this did not persuade the board:

However, in the Board’s view, the effects identified are too vague and would be mere bonus effects. They depend on the underlying computer system on which the information is to be displayed, which means that on certain devices resources may be saved, while on others there may be no such saving effect. For example, the need for less storage space is an (inevitable) bonus effect of choosing which data to consider. Moreover, the effects have a subjective aspect, depending on the respective user. For example, while a miniature display may be user-friendly for one user, it may not be the case for another user who prefers to handle his or her appointments in a separate calendar application.

Therefore, claim 1 was found to lack an inventive step, and the appeal was dismissed.

More information

You can read the whole decision here: T 1750/13 (Scheduling opportunity previewer/Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC) of 1.10.2019

Patrick Heckeler

Patrick is a European patent attorney at BARDEHLE PAGENBERG. He specializes in software patents in Europe both from a prosecution and litigation point of view.

www.bardehle.com/team/detail/heckeler-patrick.html

In this decision, the European Patent Office did not grant a patent on the idea of allowing a user to specify, via display gestures, two possible ways of transposing a displayed information table. Here are the practical takeaways of the decision T 1505/17 (Transposition gestures/HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES) of 17.2.2020 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.5.07:

Key takeaways

The invention

This European patent application generally relates to allowing a user to transpose a displayed table such that the columns become rows and the rows become columns. The description relates mainly to mirroring the table in its main diagonal, i.e. from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner. An example is shown in Fig. 1A (original table) and Fig. 1B (transposed table):

Here is how the invention is defined in claim 1:

Claim 1 is directed to a “table graphics management method”. The method first displays a table which has multiple rows and columns. When a “control track for the table” input by an input device is detected, a “moving direction” of the detected control track is determined. In view of dependent claim 3, the “control track” may be a “touch track” entered via a touch input apparatus. Therefore, the board understood the step “detecting a control track” as meaning that an input command in the form of a gesture is detected.

The claim refers only to a single row and column and to “transposing” information from the frames of the row into the frames of the column and vice versa. However, the phrase “so as to acquire a transposed table” and the examples given in the description make it clear that the table as a whole is transposed, resulting in the rows of the table being converted into columns and the columns into rows.

Claim 1 does not specify what is meant by transposing “along the moving direction of the control track”. Based on the disclosure in the application, the user can specify a transposition that transposes corner frame 11 in Figure 1A into corner frame 14 in Figure 1B by inputting a gesture that starts in frame 11 and moves in the general direction of frame 13 (of Figure 1A), i.e. perpendicular to the diagonal in which the table is mirrored. However, the board took the view that the expression “transposing along the moving direction” could also be understood as referring to the transposition that mirrors the table in the diagonal indicated by the “moving direction”. At the oral proceedings, the appellant agreed that both interpretations were possible.

Is it technical?

According to the board, claim 1 differed from the closest prior art in that the control input is a “control track” instead of a button click and in that the table is transposed “along the moving direction of the control track”, allowing the user to specify one of two possible transpositions.

First of all, the board assessed whether the concept of two possible types of transpositions was a technical feature:

In the Board’s judgment, the idea of allowing the user to specify one of the two possible table transpositions is non-technical, reflecting the user’s subjective wish to choose how to transform the table. Indeed, transposing a displayed table, for example in the context of a word processor and for editorial reasons, is itself non-technical. This non-technical idea may thus be included in the formulation of the objective technical problem.

Hence, the objective technical problem to be solved may be formulated as modifying the method of document D1 to allow the user to input commands for the two possible table transpositions.

Accordingly, what had to be assessed was whether enabling two different gestures to solve the problem was non-obvious:

In view of the prevalence of smartphones and tablets at the filing date of the present application, i.e. in April 2012, inputting user interactions by means of gestures, e.g. gestures made by moving a mouse or by moving a stylus or finger over a touch pad or touch screen along a “control track”, was well known in the art. To implement two different control options, one would have had to provide two distinguishable gestures. Distinguishing the two gestures on the basis of their control track’s “moving direction” would have been an obvious possibility, just like a scroll-down gesture was commonly distinguished from a scroll-up gesture by the gesture’s direction.

[…] The skilled person would thus have arrived at the claimed subject-matter without the exercise of inventive skill.

One argument of the appellant was that the use of gestures had several advantages, such as replacing a multitude of clicks and requiring fewer icons to be displayed. The problem to be solved had to be formulated as “modifying the method of document D1 for increasing usability on smaller displays and/or touch screens”. However, the board held that these advantages were among the known and expected advantages of the use of gestures (and indeed are not mentioned in the application as filed) and therefore cannot support an inventive step.

The appellant also argued that the claimed gestures were particularly intuitive. However, also this did not convince the board:

Given the lack of precision in the definition of the claimed gestures (see point 3.5.1 above), the Board is not convinced that the claim encompasses only the use of “intuitive” gestures. In any event, whether or not a particular input gesture or other kind of input mechanism is intuitive to the user is normally a subjective and not a technical matter.

In the end, claim 1 was found to lack an inventive step, and the appeal was dismissed.

More information

You can read the whole decision here: T 1505/17 (Transposition gestures/HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES)

Patrick Heckeler

Patrick is a European patent attorney at BARDEHLE PAGENBERG. He specializes in software patents in Europe both from a prosecution and litigation point of view.

www.bardehle.com/team/detail/heckeler-patrick.html