Gasgoo News According to foreign media reports, Ford Motor Company has been toUnited States Patent and Trademark Office(USPTO) filed a patent for a gesture-based virtual keyboard that may be applied to future Ford vehicles. The patent was filed on April 1, 2024 and published on June 24, 2025 with serial number 12337792.
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USPTO
Currently, Ford has offered the SecuriCode keyless entry keypad for several models, which can be installed as an original installation or optionally installed by dealers. In addition, Ford has recently explored various new ideas in this field through several patent applications, such as heated keypads, window-based keyless entry systems, and keyless entry keypads with biometric systems, among others. Ford’s newly released patent is an extension of the above patent, launching the concept of a gesture-based virtual keyboard.
In this case, Ford proposed a system that utilizes a virtual keyboard to grant access to the vehicle, which uses a camera instead of physical buttons. Ford notes that this approach retains the functionality of traditional keyboards while reducing costs because it projects a virtual keyboard onto the vehicle instead of relying on physical devices or expensive sensors. Other than that, the system works the same as a traditional keyless entry keypad – the user simply enters a password, and if the password is correct, the vehicle unlocks.
In the patent description, Ford says the new patent can control access to the vehicle by detecting gestures pointing to a virtual keyboard. Setup mode pre-configures a series of touch points as security keys, in which the administrator performs a series of timed different gestures based on the number and location of selected touch points detected by the vehicle using the captured live image. During multiple replicate trials, touch points provide a corresponding set of data points for each different gesture in the series. Determine the corresponding deviation profile for each corresponding set, and then expand it to represent the effective area of each touch point corresponding to that touch point sequence. If there is no overlap between any extended bias profiles, the extended bias profile will be considered as a sequence of touch points that define the security key to complete the setup mode.
“Filing patent applications is a normal part of all businesses because the process protects new ideas and helps us build a strong intellectual property portfolio,” Ford said in a statement. The ideas described in the patent application should not be taken as an indication of our business or product plans. Regardless of the patent application overview, we always put our customers first in the decision-making process for developing and marketing new products and services. ”