The Apple Watch can do a lot of things, but the company is always looking for ways to make it do even more. For starters, according to a patent Apple recently won, it appears that the company is looking into placing a camera on the wearable.

Spotted by iMore, the new patent was published on USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) and shows off what looks like a camera embedded in the rotatable crown of the Apple Watch. The camera is positioned in such a way that the user should be able to point their hands at an object in the distance to get it into a frame for a photo capture.

There is an issue here though, if this is a concept Apple is considering, then users who wear the watch on their right hand will not be able to use the camera as it will be facing towards them on a regular use case. If Apple does bring this tech to the Apple Watch, it will be interesting to see how they work around this.

“The following disclosure relates to a watch having a camera. According to some embodiments, a watch can include a rotatable dial, such as a rotatable crown used for digital inputs. A camera can be included in the assembly to allow for images to be captured through an aperture extending through the dial. A lens can be integrated within the aperture and/or behind the aperture of the dial to focus an image of a scene,” the patent describes.

“An image sensor disposed behind the aperture can further be configured to detect the movement of a marking on the dial to allow the image sensor to function both as a camera for capturing pictures of a scene, and as a sensor that detects rotation of the dial for sensing rotational inputs. Accordingly, a camera can be integrated in a relatively compact watch housing package, and the multi-purposed functionality of the camera image sensor can avoid a need for a separate sensing component on the dial,” the patent explains.

A camera on a smartwatch sounds really interesting but it might be quite a challenge for Apple to figure out how to make it functional for all users while also protecting it from sweat, dust, impact, etc. An Apple Watch faces far more rough and tumble use cases than an iPhone, so the company will have to factor that in too. How a camera will affect the wearable’s battery life will also have to be considered.

Currently, this is just a patent and there is no knowing if and when we are going to see this tech actually making its way to the Apple Watch in the future.