The next Apple Pencil might come with more gestures and even a camera

Apple has released two generations of Pencil in the last few years and the company has already started working on the third one. Contrary to what Steve Jobs said back in 2007, Apple has been invested in the development of Apple Pencil and the third Apple Pencil might come with some fancy features.

According to a new patent uncovered by AppleInsider, the new Pencil could come with more gestures and even have a camera. The Pencil already has basic gestures and Apple could add more gestures like scrolling through webpages and navigating through the OS.

Touch-based input devices, such as a stylus, can receive tactile input from a user. The tactile input functions can be performed by a touch sensor, such as a capacitive sensing device. A touch sensor can be integrated into a stylus in a low profile form. Tactile input can be received at the user’s natural grip location. Furthermore, the stylus can effectively distinguish between tactile inputs from a user and disregard sustained tactile inputs that are provided while the user simply holds the stylus at the user’s natural grip location.

– Apple

The patent also mentions the use of an embedded camera inside the Pencil along with the sensors. This would enable advanced functions and better tracking but the patent doesn’t specify any use case.

As always the patents don’t mean that we will see the final product. That said, Samsung has taken a huge leap with S-Pen and we hope to see the same from Apple as well. Unfortunately, stylus is one of the things that Steve Jobs was wrong about as he famously said, “Who wants a stylus? You have to get ’em, put ’em away, you lose ’em. Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus” at the launch event of the original iPhone back in 2007.