Samsung was first to take their a digital Pen, in their case the S Pen, to another level by using it as a tool beyond entering mere text and scribbles (art) onto a display. They updated the S Pen with remote functionality so that the pen's side trigger could be used to take a photo without the user having to touch their smartphone. A recent Samsung patent that is even more daring foresees the S Pen acting as camera with an advanced optical zoom. Samsung aside, it now appears that HP wants to jump on this new smart pen trend.

Earlier this month Patently Mobile discovered an HP patent application covering a next-gen digital pen that adds new functionality and a gesture system that will assist students, small businesses and professionals by adding extended functionality.

One way to differentiate one digital pen from another is to provide added functionality to it so that it could assist customers get a project or job done better, especially for those putting on a small presentation.

HP's patent application describes how a number of distinct gesture commands with their pen could perform a zoom operation, a rotate operation, a multimedia streaming operation, and a presentation slide operation.

HP notes that the battery power may be used to activate a sensor (#254) and Bluetooth interface (#252) and to transmit a control signal to electronic device with a touch sensitive display (#250) via Bluetooth interface. In one example, a plurality of gesture commands uniquely corresponding to a plurality of input pen gestures may be defined and stored in electronic device. Further, the electronic device may include gesture recognition program to map input pen gestures to the gesture commands defined in electronic device.

HP's patent FIG. 4 presented below illustrates an example scenario (#400) to operate the input pen in a horizontal mode and a vertical mode. The input pen gesture may include a gesture in a horizontal mode (#404) or a vertical mode (#402).

During operation, the vertical and horizontal modes may be detected using a gyro sensor chip's compass feature. In one example, the gesture in horizontal mode may be defined by holding the input pen horizontally while the pen's trigger button is activated (i.e., button been pressed and hold). For example, the gesture in horizontal mode may be used to perform operations such as a multimedia streaming operations (e.g., play, pause, fast forward, and the like) and a presentation slide operations (e.g., next slide, previous slide, and the like).

In another example, the gesture in vertical mode may be defined by holding the input pen vertically while the trigger is activated (i.e., button been pressed and held). For example, the gesture in a vertical mode may be used to perform screen operations such as a shift operation along the x or y axis, a zoom operation, a rotate operation, and the like.

HP's patent application published earlier this month was filed for in August 2018.

There are a number of Apple Patents in our Apple Pencil Archives about what's on Apple's radar screen for the device. One specific patent could perform some of what HP is promoting and even go further by allowing Apple Pencil to work with future AR and mixed reality headsets and beyond.

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