Microsoft Patents “3D Tiles UI Concept” – MyNokiaBlog Did it First.

Remember the image above? If not allow me to jog your memory, about 18 Months ago (April 2011) one of our very own readers and contributors “Peter” came up with a concept of 3D cubes for WP, which would allow tiles to deliver more content, without the need for more tiles on the actual screen (each tiles delivers more content by being a multi sided cube, rather than a single 2D square- meaning that each tile could deliver at least up to 4 times the content without taking any more space).

It was a great concept, and seemed pretty much ready to hit the presses; check out the full concept here: http://mynokiablog.com/2011/04/19/nokia-windows-phone-7-ui-concept-live-cubes/

Well it turns out that Microsoft have just been issued an eerily similar patent, that covers the same concept (of course MNB’s renders look prettier):

Example:  Microsoft describes the user being able to manually tap on a panel of a music application and the icon will rotate to display another panel indicating the currently playing song. The panel will either automatically rotate back to the front icon (e.g. photo of artist) or will be manually turned by the user at will.

For example, the icon could be associated with an email application, and the email application could receive an email as an update to the application. Based on the update to the application, the system 100 could rotate the icon in three dimensions 130. For example, as shown at 112, the icon could rotate in three dimensions automatically when the application associated with the icon is updated.

Microsoft’s patent goes a bit further to cover all sort of 3D shapes besides cubes, including Cylinders, polygons, spheres and basically any 3D shape you can think of:

Microsoft even goes a step further, implementing menus and options into each tile (which would probably work best on the “large” sized tiles in WP8:

All in all it’s a great concept, and a pretty sound one too; check out the video Peter made alongside his original post:

I’m not pointing any fingers, but Microsoft’s patent was applied for in Q2 2011, and approved in Q3 2012, Peter’s original post date was April 19th 2011. #JustSayin

Patent source via

Thanks for the tip PeterL 🙂

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Category: Concept, Gestures, ideas, Lumia, News, Nokia, Photos, Windows Phone