The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 43 granted patents for Apple Inc. today. One of the patents is titled "Unwrapping 3D meshes into low-distortion texture maps." According to Apple, the invention covers techniques for generating and using a conformal or UV mapping between an object's 3D representation (e.g., a polygonal mesh model) and a corresponding 2D representation (e.g., texture memory). One of inventors listed on the patent has since moved on to Facebook's Oculus team which provides us with a hint that the invention could also be applied to a future headset.

According to Rémi Palandri's LinkedIn profile, Palandri "Worked on Apple's 3D rendering engine. Implemented from the ground-up a mesh UV unwrapper and Ambient Occlusion/Lightmap baker, and inserted it in the engine's editor in Xcode." He also "Researched and implemented advanced lighting techniques for physical based rendering."

This same 3D mapping could also apply to the navigation system of a drone. Proof of that is found with another inventor listed on today's patent by the name of Jacques Gasselin de Richebourg who was also one of the inventors behind an invention that we covered last December in a report titled "Apple Invents an Improved Graphics System for Gaming or Possibly an Autonomous Drone Device."

Our cover graphic is that of patent FIG. 4a which illustrates a methodology to quickly identify and blur seam pixels. Apple's granted patent 9,697,621 was originally filed in Q2 2015 and published today by the US Patent and Trademark Office. To review the patent click here.

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