Apple’s AirPods could offer more than just sound, with the personal audio accessories still anticipated to gain cameras at some point in the future, and there’s patent filings to prove it.
Apple’s work to increase the utility of its wearable devices could lead in a slightly offbeat direction for one product. The AirPods, typically an audio-based item, could one day house cameras to capture images of the local environment.
In a Bloomberg newsletter on Sunday, a discussion of smart glasses includes references to other Apple products could be working on. The short list includes something like Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, but also “camera-equipped AirPods.”
The report doesn’t go into any detail about the supposed AirPods, but a lot of previous reporting offers a compelling narrative for the rumored hardware.
Audio to vision
The concept of cameras in AirPods have been broached before by the publication. The most recent claim was on December 22, with cameras in the AirPods said to include IR-sensing versions.
The December claims actually reiterated brief proclamations about camera AirPods from October 13.
As for when to expect them, it is anticipated that camera-equipped AirPods could be two to three years away.
Back in February 2024, Mark Gurman’s newsletter insisted more work was being done in the wearables field by Apple, with mutltiple things on the horizon. Smart glasses like Apple Glass were a favorite for launch, as well as a smart ring, but also AirPods.
It included a claim that project codename B796 related to AirPods with low-resolution cameras surfaced surfaced back in 2023.
Bloomberg isn’t the only venue for AirPods-camera discussions. In June, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo added to the claims that there would be AirPods with infrared camera modules, that could detect when a user turns their head.
Due to there being multiple sources, this does help make the rumor seem more plausible.
More intelligence
The addition of cameras to AirPods, even if they’re only infrared versions, may not seem like an obvious idea from the outset. It’s easier to consider the possibilities when the AirPods are used in concert with other devices.
Think of them as cameras that can have data fed from them into other devices and software.
AirPods cameras could eventually help devices like Apple Pro Vision
One obvious way they could be employed is with smart glasses. Ideally, they would need as much information about the environment as possible, so cameras at the ears could offer a wider field of view for the hardware.
This makes sense if you consider that smart glasses are ideally meant to be designed to be as light as possible, and ideally with as minimal weighty and distracting modules as possible.
By offloading the cameras to the ears, this could keep the smart glasses from being too heavy or bulky for the user to wear.
There has also been the claim that the cameras could feed data into an AI, such as a future version of Apple Intelligence on an iPhone. This could give Visual Intelligence-style features, without needing to fish the iPhone out of a pocket beforehand.
In June, Kuo proposed that AirPods can be used to improve the Apple Vision Pro experience. The IR cameras could detect changes in the environment near to the user, which can be fed into the headset for processing the environment, and to help emphasize the audio related to what they’re looking at.
Sensor patents
Aside from rumors and analysis, patent filings have previously offered glimpses of what Apple thinks it could do with AirPods. A lot of it basically revolves around shoving sensors into the earbuds of various kinds, not just cameras.
In October 2020, there was the claim that AirPods could understand no-touch sensors by detecting when hands are near the user’s ear. While a lot of the filing mentioned capacitance, an IR camera would perform the same job.
Going back to 2017, a set of filings proposed ways to add more sensors to the earbuds, including a photoplethysmogram sensor for monitoring a user’s heartrate. Galvanic skin responses, an electrocardiogram sensor, and VO2 could feasibly be measured too.
There’s even been the proposal of pose detection and workout tracking as well.
Obviously, Apple has a lot of plans for the expansion of its wearable devices. The inclusion of cameras on AirPods may not be intuitive to consumers at face value, but it could be a key development that can assist a lot more hardware in the future.
