The Apple Pencil is perhaps one of the more advanced styluses available, but at the same time, it's still a pretty basic gadget. Apple might soon change that, however, as evident by a patent that's recently surfaced through the USPTO.

The technologies described in the patent are for a future Apple Pencil with a flexible touch-sensitive area that can recognise different fingertip gestures including swiping. Descriptions like "touch-based input for stylus" are present throughout patent. It also explains how the Apple Pencil would be able to distinguish between an actual gesture and someone simply holding the stylus.

This future Apple Pencil would be different from the existing Apple Pencil 2, which does allow a user to select items with a double tap.

Apple's newest Apple Pencil patent notes that, when someone is using a stylus, they are unlikely to be directly touching the screen of another device. So, it outlines how a stylus could have input capabilities integrated into it to provide a user with "expanded input capabilities". But this would require it to have a "low profile" sensor - like a capacitive sensing device.

There are other Apple patents for future versions of the Apple Pencil. One envisioned an upgraded stylus that simulates the feeling of drawing on paper via haptic feedback. Another patent depicted a camera in the tip that can record the physical characteristics of practically any surface or object and then visually reproduce it all on a device such as an iPad or iPhone.

In other words, just because Apple has imagined it and patented it, doesn't mean it'll actually come to fruition. But it's fun to hope.