Last week we brought you news that Apple had applied for a patent for remarkably powerful 3D camera technology that could be put into an iOS device. Now it seems that 3D isn’t the only new tech Apple is looking to include in the already impressive cameras it puts in the iPhone. Another patent application reveals that Apple is also looking to create a camera with dramatically enhanced pattern recognition capabilities.

First discovered by Patently Apple, new patent application deals with technology that would allow the camera of an iOS device to recognize a wide variety of patterns including faces, phone numbers, URLs, and much more.

The potential applications of this technology are widespread. The example in the application’s drawings depicts a poster for a movie based on a book. The pattern detection tech in the camera would allow the user to scan faces on the poster to bring up more information about the author, scan URLs to open or bookmark web pages, scan the ISBN of the book on which the movie is based for more information or the option to purchase the book from an online merchant.

This being a patent application, there’s no hint as to when, if ever, we might see it in an actual iPhone. Even so, this is the kind of thing that Apple loves to introduce as a way of upping the ante in its rivalry with other smartphone makers. So while we probably won’t see this sort of thing in the next iPhone, we may expect to see it in iPhones a year or two down the road.