The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 74 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we briefly cover a patent that describes a major future Hand Gesturing system with the focus on the optical radiation and projection system behind it.

Hand Gesturing System

Apple's PrimeSense team in Israel have been working on bringing a camera system to the iPhone, iPad and future Macs that will be able to understand hand-gesturing commands. Although Google beat Apple to market with this feature in their Pixel 4 smartphone called Motion Sense, Apple will do it again with their version of hand-gesturing system – just like they delivered Face ID better than any competitor.

Apple's granted patent 10,609,357 covers an illumination assembly that projects a patterned radiation field onto an object (in this case a hand of a user of the system) in a scene. An imaging assembly captures an image of the scene within a field of view. A controller or other electronic processor processes the image in order to generate a 3D depth map of the object. The 3D map of the user's hand (and/or other parts of the user's body) may be used in a gesture-based computer interface. This granted patent focuses on the optical system in great detail.

Apple's patent FIG. 1 below is a schematic side view of an imaging system; FIG. 8 is a schematic side view of an imaging system.

You could dig into all of the details of this patent here. Below are just a few of the other patent reports that we've posted over time that relate to the same invention.

One: Apple Wins Patent for a Photonics Optical Projection Module

Two: Apple Granted a 3D Camera Patent Focused on Time-Coded Illumination

Three: Apple Wins Patent for a Projector System Designed for Controlling Games on iDevices via Gestures

Four: Apple Invents a Highly Advanced Air-Gesturing System for Future iDevices and Beyond

Five: Apple Invents another High-End 3D Optical Mapping System for Computer Vision and Beyond

It's possible that this feature could come to market as soon as with iPhone 12 with its LiDAR and/or ToF cameras and more. Though as with every patent, there's no guarantee of timing to market with any patent.