Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially granted Apple a patent that relates to an all-new feature for iDevices, especially Apple Watch that Apple coins as 'Smart Gestures.' These new smart gestures could be used in restaurants, grocery stores, at museums, sight-seeing tours and more. Users could point at a grocery item, for example, and receive details about the product. In museums, using smart gestures will allow a user to know more about the painting or a particular dinosaur.

Smart Shopping And Information Collection By Natural Gesture Using UWB

Apple notes in one of their latest granted patents that smart shopping may enable a user (e.g., patron, customer, shopper) to select, obtain information on, and/or purchase a variety of items without the need for the user to come into contact with the item.

Embodiments herein provide various techniques to reduce or avoid undesirable conditions of the smart shopping experience (e.g., line formation, crowd-building, multiple users touching a single device), thus increasing the efficiency and ease of the smart shopping experience.

To do so, the disclosed embodiments may enable a user to select, obtain information on, and purchase a desired item by gesturing towards the item.

A gesture intended to identify or interact with a target item via an electronic device may be referred to herein as a “smart gesture.”

The electronic device may include a non-wearable electronic device (e.g., a smartphone), a wearable electronic device (e.g., a smart ring, a smart watch, smart glasses, earbuds, headphones, and so on), a camera system that detects and identifies the smart gesture, and so on.

By enabling a user to choose a desired item by gesturing towards the item with any one of a number of natural, culturally pertinent hand, arm, and/or head gestures, the smart shopping experience may be simplified and streamlined—decreasing, or avoiding altogether, formation of long waiting lines and crowd building.

A variety of measures may be taken to enhance accuracy of the smart gesture and the item targeted by the smart gesture. For example, an electronic device may be equipped with one or more motion sensors that may detect a variety of movements (e.g., upward, downward, outward, inward, twisting, turning, and/or other similar motions) that may indicate a smart gesture, and processing circuitry of the electronic device may determine whether the movements form the smart gesture.

In some embodiments, a baseline for a specific user gesture may be established by a series of calibration movements that may be detected by the motion sensors. Additionally, the electronic device may include a machine learning engine that may learn and enable more accurate gesture identification.

UWB-enabled electronic devices may enable fine-granularity smart gesturing via communication with a UWB anchor or a UWB beacon. For example, a UWB transmitter or UWB transceiver of the electronic device may ping (e.g. send a request packet to) one or more UWB anchors to determine the location of the electronic device within a smart gesture-enabled premises (e.g., restaurant, retail store, grocery store, and so on) to an accuracy of up to 5 centimeters. When the user directs a smart gesture at a desired item, the electronic device may establish a vector based on the smart gesture to determine the desired item.

In the UWB beacon use case, the beacon may be associated with a certain item available for purchase. When the user gestures to a desired item associated with a UWB beacon, and the electronic device is within a threshold range of the UWB beacon, the electronic device may receive a beacon signal from the UWB beacon, associated with or indicating the desired item. Smart gesturing may also be facilitated by 5.sup.th generation (5G) cellular network slicing, wherein a smart gesture-enabled premises may have a virtualized 5G network dedicated to supporting smart gesture operation.

Apple's patent FIG. 3 below is a perspective diagram of a smart gesture; FIG. 4 is a flowchart of a method for identifying the smart gesture of FIG. 3; FIG. 5 is a perspective diagram illustrating identifying a target item of the smart gesture of FIG. 3 in a UWB anchor system; FIG. 6 is a flowchart of a method for identifying the target item using the UWB anchor system of FIG. 5; and FIG. 11 is a diagram of a smart shopping-enabled business premises.

Apple's patent FIG. 12 below is a flowchart of a method for smart shopping at the smart shopping-enabled business premises of FIG. 11 above;  FIG. 13 is a perspective diagram of smart gesturing operation in a smart gesture-enabled restaurant.

Apple's patent FIG. 15 below is a perspective diagram of smart gesturing operation in a smart gesture-enabled art gallery; FIG. 16 is a flowchart of a method for facilitating smart gesturing in the smart gesture-enabled recreational premises, such as the smart-gesture enabled art gallery of FIG. 15.

Apple's patent FIG. 17 above is a perspective diagram of smart gesturing operation to facilitate information collection while sightseeing; FIG. 18 is a flowchart of a method for enabling smart gesturing to facilitate the information collection of FIG. 17.

For more, review the full details of granted patent 11922473.

Hopefully one day, a Grocer's smart-app will also include a "find an items' feature. Sometimes a customer has to hunt several long store isles looking for a single item that doesn't appear on the isle guide. Customers should be able to simply type in "Ritz" on their iPhone or Apple watch and instantly be given the isle and shelf level where the item could be located to make life easier for their customers.