New kinds of wearable devices are often spotted in the market and sometimes they go on becoming trendy too. The smart ring is one of those wearables that could become the trend of future accessories.
Microsoft filed for its first smart ring back in 2016 and Amazon introduced its Echo Loop smart ring in 2019. With the rising competition, Apple also patented fist smart ring in 2019.
On 30th July 2020 US Patent and Trademark Office published a report that confirms Apple’s continuation of its patent for its Apple Smart Ring.
It seems like Apple has every intention to infuse their best technology into the ring and may work on it soon. Therefore, this tech giant is trying to a minimum competition by patenting its future wearable.
Apple has much faith on its wearable ring as it said in a report,
[A ring gives a user] faster, more efficient methods and interfaces for controlling external electronic devices. Thereby increasing the effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction with such devices.
About the Apple Smart Ring
Apple has previously instructed that Smart Ring is to be worn on the user’s index finger of the user’s predominant hand. The users can use the ring to control one or more devices connected to it.
A Patently Apple report claims that the smart Ring by Apple may come with a touchpad, touch screen, microphone or motion sensors to capture user input via touches, audio commands or even hand gestures. The ring could be comprised of a touch-sensitive input device, one or more tactile output generators, one or more processors, memory, and multiple programs.
Previously, Apple mentioned a few features of the ring in their patent. They claimed that the ring computing can also receive information from external devices in the form of messages or images on a touchscreen, pulses or vibrations of haptic actuators and sound.
How to control?
As mentioned before, the users can easily connect their Apple Ring to the other smart devices, e.g. smart television, cellular telephone, automobile audio or telephone system, laptop computer, tablet computer, game console, smartwatch, automation devices, etc. Then, they can control them with their rings if they wish.
The users can also control the ring using a second finger e.g. one of a thumb, fore or index finger, middle finger, ring finger and pinky finger of either hand, different from the first finger. In that case, if the user wear the ring on the index finger, they can control it with their thumb of the same hand.
Furthermore, the Apple Ring can also provide feedback to the user via speech, vibrations, or a display.
The Apple Ring continuation patent 20200241641 from Apple was filed back in April 2020 and the U.S. Patent Office published the recent patent on July 30, 2020. The availability of the Apple Smart Ring is uncertain as it is only in the patents for now. By far Apple has patented many products that are nowhere to be seen in the market. Therefore, we don’t hope to see the ring in the market anytime soon.
