Apple engineers exploring methods to enhance the Apple Pencil bought a patent for a stylus tip that may change its form or stiffness. The purpose could be to make a paintbrush for an iPad so digital portray feels extra like the actual factor.

It’s an idea the corporate has regarded into for years.

Patent explores the way forward for Apple Pencil

Many artists use an Apple Pencil to sketch and draw on an iPad. The stylus affords stress sensitivity, like an everyday pen, to make digital drawing nearer to the actual factor. Nevertheless it’s nonetheless writing with a skinny tip on a tough floor, which feels considerably totally different from utilizing many different writing implements.

Apple engineers seem like engaged on the issue. On Thursday, they have been awarded a patent entitled “Stylus With Adjustable Options.”

Within the stilted language conventional for patent filings, the outline says, “An enter gadget, similar to a stylus, can embody adjustment capabilities that adjustments a dimension, form, stiffness, or different traits of a portion of the stylus, such because the tip. The scale, form, stiffness, or different traits of a tip of the stylus might be altered to imitate traits of a selected writing or drawing device.“

The acknowledged purpose is an Apple Pencil that may mimic a spread of conventional artists’ instruments, together with a pen, pencil, chalk and marker.

An Apple Pencil as paintbrush, too?

The engineers went all the best way to eager about making an Apple Pencil into an Apple Paintbrush. It’s potential to color with a stylus, too, however that doesn’t mimic the real-world expertise in any respect. A slim, inflexible tip feels little or no like a large, versatile paintbrush.

However the patent submitting particularly mentions making the iPad stylus mimic a paintbrush. They consult with the gadget with the ability to tackle a number of bristles. And the submitting additionally contains drawings suggesting one thing of what an Apple Paintbrush may appear to be.

This can be a product space by which Apple engineers have been working for a lot of the final decade. Again in 2019, the corporate bought a patent for a “Stylus with a number of inputs” describing a stylus with versatile contact members. In different phrases, bristles like a paintbrush.

How a stylus might be made right into a paintbrush isn’t clear. Maybe an add-on attachment to an future Apple Pencil?

All that stated, simply because Apple is exploring a digital paintbrush doesn’t robotically point out that it’s going to ever develop into an precise gadget. Corporations often patent concepts that by no means flip into delivery merchandise.