Samsung Patents a Lost-Device Finder That Points You There With Your Camera

By Patentlyze Team · Updated Jul 3, 2026

Samsung is working on a way to find a lost gadget by pointing your phone's camera around the room until an on-screen arrow guides you straight to it. Think Apple's AirTag Precision Finding, but built into Samsung's own hardware stack.

How Samsung's AR device-finder actually works

Imagine your TV remote slipped between the couch cushions. Instead of crawling around and patting down the furniture, you open an app, point your phone camera at the room, and a digital arrow appears on screen pointing right at it. That's the basic idea behind this Samsung patent.

The system works in steps. First, your phone contacts Samsung's servers to get information about the missing device. Then it uses a short-range radio signal to "wake up" the lost gadget's ultra-wideband radio (a very precise location radio that can pinpoint something within centimeters). Once that radio is active, your phone calculates exactly where the device is relative to you.

Finally, it layers that location information over your live camera feed as an augmented reality overlay, so you see a visual guide on top of the real world. You just follow the arrow.

How UWB ranging triggers the AR overlay

The patent describes a multi-radio, multi-step location pipeline inside a single phone. Here's the sequence:

• Server lookup: The searching phone uses its cellular connection to retrieve metadata about the lost external device from a cloud server.
• Near-field handshake: Once the phone is physically close enough, it establishes a Bluetooth or NFC connection with the lost device to prepare it for ranging.
• UWB activation: The phone sends a command that wakes up the lost device's ultra-wideband (UWB) radio, a short-range radio technology that can measure distance with centimeter-level accuracy, far more precise than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth triangulation.
• AR overlay: The phone fuses the UWB distance-and-angle data with live frames from its camera and renders an augmented reality interface on the display, effectively painting a directional guide onto the real-world view.

The patent's independent claims were canceled in this publication, which sometimes happens during prosecution when claims are being revised or consolidated. The abstract and disclosure still fully describe the intended system.

What this means for Samsung's Find My Device ecosystem

Samsung already ships UWB hardware in its Galaxy flagship phones and has a "Find My Mobile" and SmartThings ecosystem. A camera-guided AR finder would give Samsung a direct answer to Apple's Precision Finding feature, which does something similar for AirTags on iPhone 11 and later. The difference here is that Samsung's patent covers finding other Samsung devices, not just small tracking tags, which could make it useful for locating a lost Galaxy tablet, earbuds case, or wearable.

For you as a Samsung user, this would mean less time tearing apart your bag looking for Galaxy Buds and more time just following an arrow on your phone screen. Whether Samsung ships this as a Galaxy feature or folds it into a standalone app is an open question the patent doesn't answer.

Editorial commentary on a publicly published patent application. Not legal advice.