DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 11 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) and/or 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Wald et al. (US 20200105046 A1, hereinafter Wald).
Regarding claim 11, Wald discloses a non-transitory memory (¶0033-0034) configured to store a data structure for use by a ray tracer (¶0156, ¶0162), the data structure comprising a representation of a compressed treelet (fig. 18, ¶0160-0164, ¶0179), the compressed treelet representation including a plurality of child nodes (instance nodes 1810a-d, fig. 18) each descending from a common parent node (1820, fig. 18, ¶0179), each of the plurality of child nodes including a first bounding volume definition and a second bounding volume definition, the first bounding volume definition and the second bounding volume definition corresponding to different instances of the same geometrically defined virtual object (More specifically, referring to FIG. 18, each traversal step involves a BVH node belonging to either the top level BVH 1820 or an instanced object's BVH 1810, as well as the ray. If the traversal step belongs to the top-level BVH 1820 the ray would be the original ray; if it belongs to an instance traversal step, the ray would be the original input ray transformed by the instance's associated transform. That is, each traversal step can be characterized by a triplet of (1) BVH node to be traversed, (2) instance that this node belongs to, and (3) a (possibly transformed) ray that has to traverse this node. Ignoring, for now, the order in which traversal operations are performed, each such operation then falls into one of three categories:
a) The traversal operation refers to an inner BVH node (either top-level or instance BVH). In this case, the traversal step intersects each of the child nodes against the ray; each successfully intersected node triggers a new (future) traversal step with this node.
[0181] b) The traversal operation refers to a leaf node in an instance BVH. In this case the (instance-transformed) ray intersects the primitives stored in this leaf, and updates, if required, the closest intersection as yet found for this ray, ¶0179-0181).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-10 are allowed.
The following is an examiner’s statement of reasons for allowance:
Regarding claim 1, prior arts of record taken alone or in combination fails to reasonably disclose or suggest,
a ray tracer configured to transform a ray for intersection testing against a virtual object, the ray tracer further configured to receive definitions of multiple bounding volumes bounding the virtual object, the ray tracer comprising: a second circuit that selectively culls the virtual object from intersection testing against the transformed ray when the first circuit indicates the untransformed ray does not intersect any of the multiple bounding volumes.
Regarding claim 6, prior arts of record taken alone or in combination fails to reasonably disclose or suggest,
a ray tracing method comprising: testing whether the ray intersects any of the multiple bounding volumes, thereby selectively culling the instanced virtual object from intersection testing against the transformed ray when the ray does not intersect any of the multiple bounding volumes; and transforming the ray for testing against the instanced virtual object when the testing indicates the ray intersects at least one of the multiple bounding volumes.
Any comments considered necessary by applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Conclusion
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/NURUN FLORA/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2619