Apple Glasses could come with a cool feature to hide your iPhone's screen

iPhone SE
iPhone SE (Image credit: Future)

While Apple Glasses may be a long way out still, we keep getting the occasional patent to hint at some of their functions, and another one just popped up showing us a big way that Apple's smart specs could interact with your other tech.

This patent, filed in March and just published, was spotted by Pocketnow. It shows a way of using Apple Glasses to improve the security on all your pieces of Apple tech, from your iPhone to your iPad and perhaps even your Apple Watch too.

The way the tech works is that, when you're wearing the Apple Glasses, only you can see what's on your device screen - for everybody else, it seems for all intents and purposes like you're looking at a blank screen, through a feature called 'Privacy Screen'.

A feature like this would be useful for a range of users, from those who are conscious about security and don't want malicious strangers trying to take a peek at their passwords, to people with really nosy friends.

Security-conscious

It's worth pointing out that based on this patent the Apple Glasses don't just provide a filter that lets you see your iPhone or iPad screen, rather your iPhone or iPad screen would be projected onto your glasses display.

This means others with Apple Glasses won't be able to easily get around this security feature - you'll be the only person in the world who can see what's on the screen of your phone.

Given that it's likely the first adopters of Apple Glasses will be Apple fans, it makes sense that one of the features of the specs involves the way they interact with other Apple devices, and we've seen other patents to that effect.

A patent doesn't confirm a feature is definitely coming to a device though, it only shows the company is considering an idea, so while we can now tell that Apple wants its Glasses to have useful security features, we don't know for certain what they'll be.

We're expecting Apple Glasses to come in 2021 or maybe even later, so Apple has a while to develop new ideas and features for the super specs. While that does mean we're unlikely to be able to test them anytime soon, at least we can look forward to more cool patents like this.

TOPICS
Tom Bedford
Contributor

Tom Bedford joined TechRadar in early 2019 as a staff writer, and left the team as deputy phones editor in late 2022 to work for entertainment site (and TR sister-site) What To Watch. He continues to contribute on a freelance basis for several sections including phones, audio and fitness.

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