A new Apple patent filing involves the Vision Pro recognizing hand gestures by Apple Watch wearers
About the patent filing
In the patent, dubbed “Hand Tracking System Using Smart Watch And Adaptive Low Frame Rate Camera,” Apple says modern electronic devices provide new ways for users to interact with the world around them. For example, devices may be fitted with sensors which can be used to track hand motions of a user.
The user may use gestures to select content, initiate activities, or the like. Typically, hand tracking is performed using image data. A camera may capture image data of a user’s hand and make determinations about a position and location of the hand. Thus, the image data may be analyzed to detect user input actions.
Apple says that one of the drawbacks of hand tracking methods is that the image data they rely on is provided by cameras which can consume significant power both during image capture and image processing, which can affect other system processes. What’s more, image-based hand tracking techniques often rely on two or more cameras to determine depth information for the hand.
This means the power requirements of image-based hand tracking can be quite large. Apple’s patent filing involves an improved technique for hand tracking that provides a low-power solution.
Summary of the patent filing
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent filing: “Hand tracking is performed using a head-worn device and a wearable accessory device. The head-worn device is equipped with an outward-facing camera and captures images of an environment.
“When the wearable accessory device is in the field of view of the camera, hand tracking can be initialized by establishing a common reference between the head-worn device and the wearable accessory device.
“The hand is then tracked using non-image data captured by the wearable accessory device. A neural pose network processes the non-image data to predict hand pose information. Occasionally, the camera of the head-worn device is powered on, and additional image data is captured and used to perform drift correction.”
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