The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 56 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we cover a granted patent for Apple's Animoji used in Messenger via iPhones that have their TrueDepth camera. Apple was also granted four iPhone X design patents along with a design win for the "building" relating to their Michigan Avenue Apple Store in Chicago. We wrap up this week's granted patent report with our traditional listing of the remaining granted patents that were issued to Apple today.

Emojicon Puppeting

In November 2018 Patently Apple covered Apple invention pertaining to Animoji, the marketing trademark for their patent titled "Emojicon Puppeting." Today Apple was granted a patent for this invention under number 10,210,648.

Apple's patent FIG. 3A above illustrates an image sensor and a depth sensor gathering image information and depth information, respectively, from the face, expressions, movements, and head of a user of the sending client device; FIG. 3B illustrates a message transcript that includes a puppeted emoji received in a message from a sending client device; and FIG. 3C illustrates a human face and head, a base mesh of the human face and head generated from image and depth data, one or more tracking points on the base mesh, and an emoji having tracking points corresponding to one or more of the base mesh tracking points.

Review our original patent application report for more details and revelations of what engineers were behind this project. 

Today's Design Patents

Apple's first iPhone X design patent was published in January 2018. Today Apple was granted another four iPhone X design patents under numbers D841,001, D841,002,  D841,003, and D841,004.

Apple opened their Apple Store Michigan Avenue on October 21, 2017.  Today Apple was granted a design patent for their Store with one of the patent figures presented below.

The Remaining Patents granted to Apple Today

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