Apple just patented a trackball Apple Pencil

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just granted Apple U.S. Patent No. 12,353,649, suggesting the company is thinking well beyond the iPad when it comes to the future of the Apple Pencil. Here are the details.

According to the filing, “INPUT DEVICE WITH OPTICAL SENSORS” (via Patently Apple), Apple has been exploring a stylus equipped with optical sensors that can track motion, orientation, and position in 3D space, without needing to touch a screen. That would allow users to draw on virtually any surface, or even just above it, within a short range.

And if that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. First, current Apple Pencils already detect tilt and pressure. And second, just last month at WWDC25, Apple showcased the Logitech Muse, a spatial stylus for Vision Pro that lets users sketch in the air.

The patent describes multiple methods for drawing without touching

Apple’s patent details two types of optical sensors that could be built into the stylus in a pretty similar way:

• Optical flow sensors, which work a bit like optical mice by analyzing frame-to-frame changes in light to detect motion.Laser speckle flow sensors, which track how granular laser reflections shift as the stylus moves.

• Laser speckle flow sensors, which track how granular laser reflections shift as the stylus moves.

As described in the patent, both systems can detect movement even when hovering above a surface (up to 100mm, or 3.94 inches), while also allowing the stylus to operate on non-touch-sensitive materials like wood or paper.

The patent also describes how a trackball might feed internal sensors

One version of the Pencil described in the patent features a trackball tip, which rolls as you move the stylus. But instead of using mechanical encoders (like those little internal wheels in traditional mice that detect ball rotation), Apple proposes using internal optical sensors to track the ball’s movement.

Here’s how Apple describes this system on paragraph 64:

“In some examples, optical sensor(s) are disposed within a portion of a stylus body (e.g., housing of a stylus) separate from the stylus tip. The optical sensor(s) can be configured to measure displacement of internal components of a stylus, such as by tracking displacement of a trackball at least partially disposed in the housing of the stylus. (…) Although disposing the trackball at the stylus tip prevents the optical sensor(s) from accurately measuring displacement with respect to the z-axis, tilt, orientation, and/or axial rotation of the stylus, disposing the trackball at the stylus tip causes the surface to be less prone to scratch and contamination, to provide improved signal-to-noise ratios when detected by the optical sensor(s), and to be agnostic to surface optical properties.

And a few extra sensors to boot

The patent also describes combining this tech with other sensors, like inertial measurement units, force detectors, and even machine vision, potentially enabling things like gesture input, handwriting recognition, and 3D drawing.

While that would make it a natural fit for devices like the Vision Pro or future headsets, where input tools need to work beyond a flat touchscreen, it also shows that Apple is not done investigating what else it can add to its vision for the spatial computing era.

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