That Apple patents a considerable number of inventions and ideas far more important than those that end up taking shape in its products is something we already know. What we don’t know at all is what the idea of patent an Apple Pencil with cameras.
The idea, however, appears in one of the company’s recent patents. And the truth is that it makes a lot of sense not only in the realm of creation. A type of transition from physical pen to electronic pen
Useful now, critical later
Although it is not common for most users, when we draw with the Apple Pencil, sometimes we want to realize replicate something we see in the real world. It can be just one color or an entire texture. While this is something we can already achieve through an app and our iPhone’s camera, it looks like Apple wants to go a step further and bring the process straight to the pencil.
The patent, as they tell us in PatentlyApple, lifts an Apple Pencil with optical sensors. Some sensors that would be located at the tip of the pencil and they would be camouflaged with a material that could be transparent, but with a texture similar to that of the tip that we already know.
So far, the idea seems really interesting for designers and others, but other than that, we can go further if we think about the Apple Pencil as a fundamental element of the future extended reality from Apple. Without resorting to the sensors of our Apple Reality, this Apple Pencil would offer a very precise means of scanning physical surfaces to replicate them in the virtual environment.
As we’ve said on other occasions, Apple’s patents don’t necessarily have to translate into a product we can buy, but they do show us — a bit — the areas of interest and research of the company
A resource that, although today it could already be very interesting for some creative uses of Apple devices, in a few months, with the arrival of extended reality, it could be fundamental for our interaction with the whole ecosystem. We will see what form this patent will eventually take.
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