We now know that the Apple Vision Pro will be available to purchase starting February 2 and that pre-orders will open on January 19, but a newly discovered patent suggests that Apple engineers are busy looking ahead to the future of Apple's headphones. mixed reality.
The patent, discovered by Patently Apple, shows what looks like a giant Apple Pencil. The idea is that the instrument can be used to write or draw in a virtual space, or to select and manipulate elements that exist in virtual or augmented reality.
“A hand controller with a marker-shaped housing may have an elongated housing that extends the width of the user's hand and that can be held as a pen, pencil, marker, wand, or tool,” it reads in part. of the patent application.
And while a “head-mounted device” like the Vision Pro is referred to extensively in the documentation, this peripheral could also be used with phones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches and other devices, according to the patent.
Virtual brushes
One of the cool little tricks this implement could offer, according to the patent, is being able to display a variety of “brush heads” that are only visible in AR, so it could go from looking like a paintbrush to an aerosol can on its inside. the Vision Pro headphones, for example.
We've got bump, wave and shake minions in addition to writing and drawing, so there's clearly a lot of potential for whatever device that is. All these movements would be measured by sensors integrated into the pencil itself.
Apple has made a point of saying that you only need your fingers and hands to manipulate the software environment inside the Vision Pro headphones, but we've also seen other patents that suggest other input methods are currently in the works.
The usual patent disclaimers apply here: these presentations give us some ideas about the technology that companies are developing and thinking about, but at the same time there is no guarantee that a real product will result from them.
