US Patent Issued to Niantic Spatial on May 19 for "Augmented reality using sky segmentation" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,632,968, issued on May 19, was assigned to Niantic Spatial Inc. (San Francisco).

"Augmented reality using sky segmentation" was invented by Erik Marshall Murphy-Chutorian (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Nicholas John Butko (Cupertino, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An AR client device generates and uses a background model to identify portions of images that depict the sky. A background model is a model that represents where the sky is visible for the client device. To identify a sky background portion of an image, a client device can map an image onto the background model and thereby determine which portion of the image represents the sky....