#HTE

Future Apple Pencils May Feature Color Sampling

Here’s an interesting possibility: Prior to whipping out a digital rendering, you touch your Apple Pencil to an image, a real-life object or, er, a competitor’s rendering. Then you touch the Pencil to your tablet and it “drops” the color there, like a real-world eyedropper. No more going back and forth with the color sliders while holding a photo up to the screen and hoping your monitor’s calibrated properly. A color sensor is built into the Pencil’s tip.

That’s the hope, anyway, following a patent application filed by Apple this month and picked up on by MacRumors: “Computer System With Color Sampling Stylus,” application no. 20200225778, describes a stylus containing an LED for illumination and “a plurality of photodetectors” that measure light on different color channels. As for “dropping” the color onto the iPad, “The tip may be configured to emit electromagnetic signals that are detected by a touch sensor in a touch sensitive display.”

While I suspect this would be a boon primarily to those who do illustrations of nature, being able to quickly nail a precise tone of wood, leather or other natural materials ought be a timesaver in plenty of industrial design studios.