The United States Trademark and Patent Office (USPTO) has today approved a new patent application from Apple which is related to custom hand gestures for head-mounted devices. The head-mounted devices could be both headsets like the Apple Vision Pro and smart glasses.
It should be beneficial for users physically unable to perform a pre-defined gesture
The Vision Pro detects pre-defined hand gestures performed by a user and performs a corresponding function in response. However, in some cases, a user may be physically unable to perform the pre-defined hand gesture or to perform the function with a different gesture.
According to the patent application, users can customize gestures to achieve different interactive responses in the future. The application describes that the concept aims to allow electronic devices to detect user-predefined gestures and respond to perform corresponding functions. The application includes 48 design sketches, detailing how to detect these user-preset custom gestures and assign them to tasks or functions.
The company introduced a new tool called Gesture Association Tool in the patent, which first asks the user what functions they want to create gestures for. For an available gesture that is not activated, the device will assign a name to it. You can see a demonstration of it in the image below.
The process will be performed by a device including an image sensor, one or more processors, and non-transitory memory. The image sensors will capture the hand movement and share it with the processor. Then the device will extract a first set of features from the collected data and will gesture matching criteria based on the information collected through the sensors. To get a better idea of the process, you can refer to the images below.
While the main focus is on head-mounted devices like the Vision Pro, according to the patent application, the concept could be used in many other aspects such as headphones, windows having integrated display capability, displays formed as lenses designed to be placed on a person’s eyes, and much more.
(Via)
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