Details Sketchy in Apple Patent Many See as Foretelling an iPen Smart Pen Device

Apple-watchers spotted a new U.S. patent (8,922,530) filed in January 2010 and granted Tuesday for a “communicating stylus,” and it has many guessing that this may mean that an iPen smart pen device is on the horizon. A close read of the patent listing Aleksandar Pance, of Saratoga, California, as the inventor and Apple as the assignee confirms that Apple is talking about an electronic pen that captures handwriting or drawing, on any surface or in 3D space, and sends it to a computer for display on a screen. But that same close read also reveals a marked shortage of hard technical facts on how this is actually achieved. The Livescribe family of pens already offers very accurate handwriting capture, but specialized paper is needed. The paper has micro-marks on the surface that form a near-invisible map. An infrared light sensor in the pen uses the map to keep accurate track of its movement over the paper. In the patent, Apple says this approach is a “problem” and aims for “a stylus that can enter data into a computing device, regardless of the surface with which it is used.” The Apple stylus will contain a “position sensing device such as an accelerometer,” which tracks position “with respect to an initial or zero point,” the patent says. This sounds similar to the error-prone “dead reckoning” used by navigation systems before GPS became available. Apple’s patent documentation offers little help on how accuracy will be improved sufficiently to capture handwriting legibly, other than to suggest the use of multiple sensors and “time stamped” radio or sonic waves, with or without “triangulation” and with or without a magnetometer to register “magnetic north.” Apple representatives didn’t comment.