The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently in June, granted a patent developed by Apple for "synthetic group selfies”, a technology that could help users to take group selfie shots while still being appropriately socially distanced.
Despite the fact that there is a global pandemic restricting social gatherings these days, however, it might be interesting that the concept of social distancing selfie wasn’t developed specifically with the current situation; Apple first filed for this patent in 2018 But it was granted recently on June 2nd.
Therefore, it’s likely that Apple had other intentions for the tech rather than to take socially responsible group photos. Anyway, now would be the perfect time for Apple to bring such a concept to reality.
Apple understands the intentions of users to tack as a popular way to capture or memorialize an event or moment. When a user wishes to memorialize an event with friends, the user can capture a group selfie where the self-image includes the user and the user's friends. Despite capturing an individual selfie that can be accomplished easily since only the user needs to be placed within the field of view of the image capturing device, capturing a group selfie can be much more difficult since the user must have the user and the group within the field of view when capturing the group selfie.
According to the description of the patent, the synthetic group selfie device can be stored as a multi-resource object, while preserves individual selfies. But what is the synthetic group selfie and how it can be defined?
A synthetic group selfie can be an arrangement or composition of static individual images, stored video images, or live streaming video images. when a selfie is received on the user’s device by the group selfies application, the group selfies application can process the individual selfie to remove the background of the image using specific depth information. The computing device (or the group selfies device according to the patent) can automatically and intelligently, assemble, and arrange the individual selfies into the synthetic group selfie. The synthetic group selfie can be stored as a multi-resource object that maintains the individual selfie images so that the user who created the synthetic group selfie or a recipient of the synthetic group selfie can modify the arrangement of the individual selfies within the synthetic group selfie.
The software would allow a user to invite others to participate in a group selfie that would arrange multiple people into a single image. It would remove the background image from other users' selfies and place them into the user's photo.
In this respect, Apple is completely true to itself: perfect technical implementation with maximum simplicity and intuitive operation.
As is always the case with patents There is no indication about whether Apple decides to move forward with the patented software, but it would be the perfect way for people to create memories with one another while still socially distancing.
