ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 30 -- United States Patent no. 12,373,969, issued on July 29, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).
"Specular surface mapping" was invented by Luke A Pillans (San Diego), Aleksandr M Movshovich (Santa Clara, Calif.), Nicholas C Soldner (Mountain View, Calif.), Daniel Kurz (Boulder, Colo.) and Arthur Y Zhang (Mountain View, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods and apparatus for specular surface mapping in which a camera detects reflections of a light source from a specular surface. The detected light sources may be projected onto a celestial sphere as virtual point sources. True positive observations should be tightly clustered on the celestial sphere; ...