The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 57 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we cover Apple's invention for creating synthetic group selfies which could turn out to be a lot of fun. 

Apple notes that selfies are a popular way to capture or memorialize an event or moment. An individual selfie can, for example, be an image captured by a user of an image capturing device where the subject captured in the image is the user. 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. While capturing an individual selfie 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 arrange the user and the user's friends within the field of view of the image capture device when capturing the group selfie.

Apple's granted patent covers a computing device that can generate a synthetic group selfie. For example, a synthetic group selfie can be an arrangement or composition of individual selfies obtained from a plurality of computing devices into a single group image (e.g., synthetic group selfie). The individual selfie images can be still images, stored video images, or live streaming images.

The synthetic group selfie can be a composition of still images, stored video images, or live streaming video images. The computing device can automatically arrange the individual selfies into the synthetic group selfie. The synthetic group selfie can be stored as a multi-resource object that preserves 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.

Particular implementations provide at least the following advantages. Group selfies can be easily generated without having to organize or arrange people around a camera.

The processing of individual selfies to remove background portions of individual selfie images can be distributed amongst multiple devices to reduce the amount of processing required to be performed by an individual device. Individual selfies can be automatically and intelligently arranged within the synthetic group selfie so that the user is not required to arrange individual selfies within the synthetic group selfie.

Apple's patent FIG. 1 below is a block diagram of an example system for generating synthetic group selfies; FIG. 3A illustrates a graphical user interface for generating a synthetic group selfie; FIG. 3B illustrates an example graphical user interface presenting an option to recapture an image; FIG. 4 illustrates an example graphical user interface prompting a contributor user to participate in a synthetic group selfie.

Apple's patent FIG. 6 above illustrates an example graphical user interface presenting an option to recapture an image; FIG. 7 illustrates an example graphical user interface for presenting a preview of a synthetic group selfie.

Apple's patent FIG. 8 below is a diagram illustrating an example synthetic group selfie composition technique; FIG. 9 illustrates an example graphical user interface for editing a synthetic group selfie; FIG. 10 illustrates an example graphical user interface for storing a synthetic group selfie.

Apple's patent FIG. 11 below is flow diagram of an example process for generating synthetic group selfies; FIG. 12 is a flow diagram of an example process for participating in a synthetic group selfie at a contributor device; FIG. 13 is a flow diagram of an example process for automatically arranging individual selfies into a synthetic group selfie.

Apple's granted patent was originally filed in Q3 2018 and published today by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Apple lists Jean-Francois Albouze as the sole inventor.