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 § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 1-4 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Murtaza (US 2020/0278828) in view of Davis (US 2020/0177994) in further view of Donaldson (US 2015/0189457).
Regarding claim 1, Murtaza teaches A method for navigating a virtual space, comprising: identifying a plurality of audio sources (Murtaza figure 2A, sound sources 1-2: audio element 1-2); arranging a plurality of nodes respectively corresponding to the plurality of audio sources in a grid structure within a multidimensional sound space (Murtaza figure 2A, and ¶0201, coordinates of Cartesian XYZ-system); receiving a user input, wherein the first user input comprises a navigational input of a user with respect to the multidimensional sound space (Murtaza figures 2a-2b and ¶0201-0202, when the user moves to change their coordinates); determining a user location in the multidimensional sound space based on the user input (Murtaza figures 2a-2b and ¶0201-0202, when the user moves to change their coordinates); determining a distance between the user location and a node of the grid structure (Murtaza figures 2a-2b and ¶0201-0202, the distances d’1 and d’2 between the user viewpoint and the sound sources); and playing a sound associated with the node based on the distance (Murtaza ¶0207, “The closer the user's position 110′ or 110′ to the first audio source 152-1, the higher the needed resolution and/or quality of the stream associated to the first audio source 152-2. This exemplary case may be applied to the audio element 1 (152-1) in FIG. 2a as well as the audio element 2 (152-2) in FIG. 2b. The more distant the user's position 110 from the second audio source 152-2, the lower the needed resolution of the stream 106 associated to the second audio source 152-2”), however does not explicitly teach wherein the grid structure is based on a tessellation pattern and the sound is binaural.
Davis teaches wherein the grid structure is based on a tessellation pattern (Davis figure 4 and ¶0014, “a tessellation and cell expansion approach can be used to determine the location or approximate location of an audio source”).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to use the known technique of Davis to improve the known method of Murtaza to achieve the predictable result of improving the accuracy of the sound source location.
Donaldson teaches the sound is binaural (Donaldson ¶0023, “binaural audio signal”).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to use the known technique of Donaldson to improve the known method of Murtaza in view of Davis to achieve the predictable result of a more immersive 3D sound.
Regarding claim 2, Murtaza in view of Davis in further view of Donaldson teaches wherein: the grid structure comprises a rectangular grid (Davis figure 4), a hexagonal grid, or a triangular grid.
Regarding claim 3, Murtaza in view of Davis in further view of Donaldson teaches monitoring user interactions with the plurality of audio sources (Murtaza figure 8a); generating features representing the plurality of audio sources based on the user interactions; mapping the plurality of audio sources to the plurality of nodes in a multidimensional sound space based on the features (Donaldson ¶0031, “Interface 107 is configured to detect one or more interactions 135 by a user, whereby one or more parameters can be determined responsive to such interactions. Such parameters are used by sound field spatial transformer 150 to modify the direction/positions of perceived sources of audio in transformed reproduce sound field 180a in real-time”); identifying a location in the multidimensional sound space; identifying a node of the plurality of nodes based on the location; and playing a sound based on an audio source associated with the node (Donaldson ¶0031, “The request and data are provided to reproduced sound field translator 154, which is configured to translate one or more reproduced sound fields to form transformed sound fields responsive to interactions with interface 107. In this case, swapping portions 122c and 123c causes sound field spatial transformer 150 to swap locations of transformed sound fields 122a and 123a in transformed reproduced sound field 180a”).
Regarding claim 4, Murtaza in view of Davis in further view of Donaldson teaches generating a hierarchical arrangement of the plurality of audio sources; mapping a first audio source of the plurality of audio sources to a first node in a first plane of the multidimensional sound space based on the hierarchical arrangement; and mapping a second audio source of the plurality of audio sources to a second node in a second plane of the multidimensional sound space based on the hierarchical arrangement (Donaldson figure 4, with BRI a user can arrange the sound sources based on the distance to the user which can be considered a hierarchical arrangement. And the different angle sub sections can be considered planes).
Conclusion
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/NORMAN YU/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2693
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