A new Apple patent published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office describes an intriguing Apple Vision Pro accessory, a “digital stone.”
Joseph Foley for Creative Bloq:
A new Apple patent filing with the US Patent and Trademark Office describes “a small portable physical object for use in an extended reality system”. Later in the text, it refers to the device as a “digital stone” or a “go stone.”
Apple says the stone could allow virtual objects from the XR world to persist in the real world after you turn the Vision Pro off.
[I]t’s all very vague and there’s little in the way of concrete examples in the patent documentation, but Apple says it could be possible to associate the stone with a virtual object in Vision Pro and for that association to continue after you power off the headset, allowing the user to carry content from the XR environment in the physical world and reaccess it later either using the same Vision Pro or another XR system.
So a kind of storage device for Apple’s spatial computing concept? …Apple also mentions a more sophisticated device with the potential to house cameras and sensors, including for touch, heart rate, temperature, Lidar, radar, sonar, GPS and more and could give haptic feedback. This sounds more like some form of controller that could be used to manipulate objects in the XR world like gloves used in some VR systems. This could make it something like the 3D equivalent of a mouse.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last week, “As the Apple Pencil is to iPad, an accessory for specific use cases, hand-held controllers will be to Apple Vision Pro.”
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