ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 31 -- United States Patent no. 12,513,259, issued on Dec. 30, was assigned to Frozen Moments Inc. (Henderson, Nev.).

"Linking physical items to virtual content with indicia encodings" was invented by Jessica Medeirosman (Henderson, Nev.) and Ryan Medeirosman (Henderson, Nev.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A physical object is printed with an image that is augmented with an arrangement of visual indicia. Properties of the visual indicia such as size, shape, color, orientation, and size encode an identifier of supplemental virtual content. When the physical object is scanned by a camera of a device, the encoded identifier of supplemental content is extracted from the visua...