Apple has been granted a patent that will allow the phone to create “synthetic group selfies”, which has become a new reality in this COVID-19 pandemic.
The new patent outlines a software that will operate like a group Facetime. A person can invite several people to take selfies and the software would superimpose them in a different position behind the organization.
PatentlyApple has more information about this where they said that this was part of a series of 57 newly granted patents for Apple published by the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The synthetic group selfie can be an arrangement or composition of individual selfies obtained from a plurality of computing devices. The individual selfies can be still images, stored video images or live stream images. The resulting group selfie can be stored as a resource that preserves the individual selfies so that the arrangement of the individual selfies can be modified later on. It is still not clear whether this will be available on iPhones or iPad or both.
This patent was originally filed by Apple in Q3 2018 and interesting enough, it was published by the US Patent and Trademark Office on 2nd June 2020.
The timing is interesting since we are in a year where wearing masks outside is normal and health officials advise us to social distance due to the COVID-19 pandemic. If this technology somehow appears on later versions of iOS, it will allow people to take such selfies in the future. This follows Apple’s move to make changes on iOS 13.5 so that people can unlock their phones easier while wearing a mask.
