Apple Files Patent to Make Far-Away Buttons Easier to Pick With Your Eyes
Eye trackers are slightly off, and that error gets worse the farther away you look. Apple's patent filing grows or shrinks the invisible target around a button to match how far away it appears.
What Apple's depth-based eye selection does
Eye tracking is never perfectly accurate. The spot a device thinks you're looking at can sit a little off from where your eyes really are, and that small miss gets bigger the farther away the thing you're looking at appears to be.
Apple's filing tackles this for screens where buttons can float at different distances, like a headset showing an app launcher out in the room in front of you. Each button has an invisible "hit zone" that your gaze has to land in. Apple's idea is to resize that zone based on how far away the button appears: push a button farther off and its zone grows, bring it closer and the zone shrinks.
The goal is fewer accidental selections, like launching the music app when you only meant to glance at the drawing app sitting next to it.
… determining a dimensional characteristic of a selection region of the UI element based on a depth between the UI element and the electronic device …
Translation: The system calculates the size of the clickable area depending on how far away the button appears to be.
How the target grows as a button moves away
The core of the claims is simple. The device shows a UI element (a button, icon or menu item) and gives it a selection region, an invisible area that counts as "looking at it." The size of that region is set by the depth, meaning how far the element appears from the device. When the depth changes, the region's size changes too: a larger depth makes the region larger, and a smaller depth makes it smaller.
The filing explains the reasoning. Eye trackers have a small angle error, and the farther away something is, the more that error gets magnified at the target. A wider region leaves room for the miss.
Later claims add details:
- The element is selected when your gaze stays inside the region for a threshold amount of time.
- A gaze indicator appears once you've hit the target.
- The device can cast a gaze cone (a cone that starts at your eye and is centered on the direction you're looking) and check whether it touches the region. The cone's radius grows as depth increases.
The description also covers other options the claims don't center on: buttons with two regions you look at in order, neighboring buttons' regions shrinking or switching off once you've locked onto one, and a selection that "sticks" to the first button if your gaze drifts.
… determining, based on eye tracking data, that a targeting criterion is satisfied with respect to the first selection region or the second selection region …
Translation: The device figures out what you are looking at using your eye movements.
What this means for gaze-controlled headsets
If you use a headset where you pick things by looking, a wrong selection is annoying: the wrong app opens, or you have to stare harder to fix it. Sizing targets by distance is meant to keep a button across the virtual room about as easy to pick as one up close, without making everything huge all the time.
The filing is also a continuation of an application first filed in 2023, which itself claims a March 2022 provisional. So Apple has been working on this problem for a while. Nothing in the text says when or whether it would ship.
Apple's 54th filing we've tracked in the AR glasses race since May adds to a run that includes finding friends through walls and skipping repeat eye scans.
Claim 1 is short and wide. It asks for four things: a button on a screen, a hit zone whose size depends on how far away the button appears, a way to notice that distance changing, and a resize when it does. Eyes are never mentioned in that claim; they appear only in later claims.
As written, then, the first claim describes distance-scaled hit zones on any display, whatever input is used. The gaze cone and the hold-for-a-moment timer sit in dependent claims, which narrow things down.
The idea is easy to grasp: farther targets need bigger landing zones. Whether examiners allow a claim this broad is an open question, and some wording (claims 7 and 8 contain phrases that don't line up with claim 1) suggests the text may still change.
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The drawings
27 drawing sheets from US 2026/0329373 A1 · click any drawing to enlarge
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