Microsoft’s hardware engineers are always looking for ways to enhance their New User Interface initiatives, with the most recent innovation to hit the market being the Surface Dial.
Pen computing has however always been a major focus at Microsoft, and it is the Surface Pen which has seen the majority of the patent action.
In the latest innovation of the Surface team, they imagine a Surface Pen equipped with multiple multi-color LEDs in the tip, middle and end of the device, which could be used in a variety of different ways.
The most basic feature would be an LED in the tip which would reflect the current color of the ink which would be applied when the pen is being used to write.
More advanced (and probably more attractive) would be the use of an LED in the body or tip of the device which could be used for notifications, such as low battery, or more interestingly, new email and other notifications.
Especially with new Always Connected PCs and connected standby, our PCs, like our phones will now be doing a lot more with the screen off, and having an easily positioned notification light would be a rather cool feature.
The full patent
can be seen here.
source
