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Apple may adopt touchless gesture control in future iPhones

Touchscreen gesture control has recently been patented by Apple for their slide to unlock feature, but if a newly discovered patent is to be trusted, the Cupertino tech firm may be ready to do away with touch gestures overall, allowing users to control the device using a wave of the hand, Kinect style.

If video editing fans weren’t annoyed enough by Final Cut Pro X’s divergent new user interface update, they’re not going to be too happy about the new patent, “Real Time Video Process Control Using Gestures” from Apple this week.

The patent primarily concerns the application of one touchscreen device to film a video and then initiating processing and editing commands and filters on the video while then streaming it to another device over Bluetooth. Complicated stuff.

Another interesting facet of the patent is that the gestures required don’t even need to be touchscreen based; “Other embodiments describe hand gestures in either two or three dimensions that can be sensed by the video capture device using IR sensors, optical sensors” says the concerning patent application, attributed to Benjamin A Rottler and Michael Ingrassia Jr I.

Rumour also has it that a future model of Apple’s iPhone and potentially the latest incarnation of Apple TV will use a front facing camera to detect the user’s movements.

Other gesture based devices, such as Microsoft’s Kinect, have been tremendously successful. Hopefully Apple’s adoption of such technologies will bring similar attention.

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