Group selfies from different locations? That's not possible. But an Apple patent is making people sit up and take notice.
About two years ago, Apple filed a patent describing a technology that allows people to take group selfies even when they're not in the same location. Group selfies are at least as popular as regular selfies. But in times like these, when social distancing is more important than ever, such group photos aren't possible. However, Apple seems to have been pursuing an idea that would make this possible for some time. The patent description states:
While capturing an individual selfie is easy to accomplish since only the user needs to be placed within the field of view of the image capturing device, capturing a group selfie may be much more difficult since capturing the group selfie requires the user to arrange the user and the user's friends within the field of view of the image capturing device. Therefore, a simpler mechanism for capturing a group selfie would be beneficial. In some implementations, a computing device may generate a synthetic group selfie. For example, a synthetic group selfie may be an arrangement or composite of individual people fused into a single group image from a plurality of computing devices. For example, the synthetic group selfie may be a composite of still images, videos, or live images. The computing device may automatically assemble the individuals into the synthetic group selfie.
The backgrounds are replaced automatically
Basically, it's an app that allows you to take a group selfie despite social distancing. While a user invites friends or family members to this session, the app takes care of the rest. The difference to a video chat is that the application edits the individual selfies and completely removes the backgrounds. All the selfies are then combined into one large image with a uniform background. The depth measurement can be used both for clean cutouts and for correctly merging with the background. All in all, the technology seems really exciting. However, it is not known whether Apple is actually working on such an app. It is not uncommon for registered patents to remain just an idea - let's wait and see. AirPods Pro on special offer at Amazon – now available for 226 euros. (Photo by Mangostar / Bigstockphoto)
