Tell us that’s not a game controller — image credit: Apple
A new patent filing shows that Apple has been working on a fairly standard external game controller device for Apple Vision Pro, backing up recent rumors of it hoping to partner with Sony.
In December 2024, it was rumored that Apple had approached Sony in a move to get a handheld game controller for the Apple Vision Pro headset. Now it appears that Apple has at least attempted to create such a controller itself, even if it seems to be much the same as existing ones.
An Apple patent application called “Handheld Input Devices,” has now been made public, after being filed in August 2023. It describes in detail a system that can realistically only be a game controller.
“A system may include an electronic device such as a head-mounted device and a handheld input device for controlling the electronic device,” it says. “A lanyard may be removably attached… [and] may include visual markers, such as infrared light-emitting diodes and/or fiducials, that can be detected by an external camera and used to track a location of the lanyard.”
This is a patent application, and as ever Apple strives to own technology without giving away more than it has to. So across the application’s roughly 18,000 words, there are just three references to games — and two are in the same sentence.
“For example,” continues the patent application, ” the location, orientation, and/or movement of [the] lanyard… may be used as a video game controller for a video game displayed by [a] head-mounted device.”
The only other reference to gaming is in a section about control circuitry, “to switch… to using [the] input device as a pointing device or game piece.”
Since gaming is so buried in the piece, it would be possible that this handheld device is not intended for games. That would be backed up by how of its 13 illustrations or diagrams, more than half appear to be about the lanyard, or to show over-sized Apple Pencil.
That Apple Pencil illustration, though, is one of a stock set of drawings Apple routinely includes in patent applications. And what appears to be more significant is that the very last illustration unquestionably shows a hand holding a Wii-style controller.
Apple would not unveil a revolutionary new design of any device in a patent diagram that is solely meant to illustrate an idea. But the combination of the Wii-style drawing and the text descriptions, do make this sound like at least most existing game controllers.
Detail from Apple’s patent application showing just one of the many drawings of lanyards
It’s just a controller that might, for instance, “include an inertial measurement unit with an accelerometer for gathering information on input device motions such as swiping motions, waving motions, writing movements, drawing movements, shaking motions, rotations, etc.”
Or the “handheld input device may include a haptic output device to provide the user’s hands with haptic output and may include other output components such as one or more speakers.”
If it really is just the same as other controllers, it’s hard to see how Apple hopes to get its patent application granted. Nonetheless, it is a patent application, and it is credited to the prolific inventor Paul X. Wang, who has had countless patents granted before.
Still, As it is an application, and not even a granted patent yet, the existence of the research is no proof that a device is coming soon, or ever. That’s always the case as Apple applies for many hundreds of patents annually.
But Apple did also famously get patents for its Apple Vision Pro technology, while hiding what it was doing in plain sight.
