Detail from the patent showing a top down view of one possible location for a touch-sensitive control on Apple Vision Pro
Apple is researching how to best add a touch-sensitive component that a user can customize to the Apple Vision Pro, that is very much like the Action Button on the iPhone.
If it works, add it to everything. The Action Button started life on the Apple Watch Ultra in 2022, but then came to the iPhone 15 Pro, and is now on all models of the iPhone 16.
Now a newly-granted patent shows that Apple has fully researched giving the Apple Vision Pro an Action Button in the form of a touch-sensitive region. The patent, originally filed in June 2023, is called “Electronic Devices with Finger Sensors.”
“Challenges can arise in providing output and gathering input in a wearable electronic device such as a head-mounted device,” says the patent. “If care is not taken, input-output devices may be cumbersome to use and may not be able to provide desired output.”
Apple’s proposed solution is one or more “finger sensors that are configured to detect touch input, force input, and/or other input.” Such a sensor could “run along a peripheral edge of an external display mounted on the front face” of the headset.
The sensor could gather touch input, but also force input, and it could have “a proximity sensor configured to detect fingers that are not touching the finger sensor.” And it could also “provide haptic feedback (e.g., when a user supplies input to a finger sensor).”
So it’s a touch-sensitive area of the front of the Apple Vision Pro, or it might be a section that can detect force as if it were a button. Or presumably, it could accept swipes as well as taps and presses.
It’s an unusually short patent — consisting of 19 pages, around 2300 words, and 10 illustrations. This is a far cry from the normal 40-pagers that we look at twice a week.
So, even more than most Apple patents, its focus is on how this proposal could work rather than what it could be used for.
Most drawings show a touch area on the front of the headset, but this one resembles a Digital Crown
However, there is one reference that makes this clearly an Action Button. It’s already said that it would be a touch area on the front of the headset, but then it suggests it could “implement a reconfigurable function row for the wearable electronic device.”
Apple does not use the words “Action Button,” nor does it compare this proposal to the Camera Control touch sensitive button on most of the iPhone 16 range.
Then one illustration shows something less like a single button, and more like an over-sized Digital Crown.
Yet based on the descriptions of its positioning and the hint of its usefulness, it’s quite clear that this is an Action Button for the Apple Vision Pro.
What is not clear, though, is if this is research aimed at future versions of the headset — or was rejected from the original edition that launched in early 2024.
This patent’s inventors include Ritu Shah, who has many previous patents with Apple concerning mixed reality headsets.
