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.
Claims 1, 7-8, and 14-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Makeev (US20230124297A1), Singh (Singh, Karan, and Evangelos Kokkevis. "Skinning Characters using Surface Oriented Free-Form Deformations." Graphics interface. Vol. 2000. 2000.), and Zhang (Zhang, Jie, et al. "3DCMM: 3D comprehensive morphable models for accurate head completion." Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual-Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry. 2022.), and
Regarding claim 1, Makeev teaches a computer-implemented method (Makeev; ¶0005, describes a computer implemented method), comprising:
rendering, by the processor, the accessory coupled to the avatar head (Makeev; ¶0090, describing the avatar and its layered clothing items are rendered such that obscured surfaces of underlying body parts and items are not rendered and, Makeev; ¶0047, the items include accessories placed on parts of the avatar and, Makeev; ¶0058-59, describe that includes the head. This teaches rendering the accessory coupled to the avatar head.)
However, Makeev does not disclose explicitly transforming an inner geometry of an avatar head to a spherical inner geometry, mapping an outer geometry of an accessory for the avatar head to the spherical inner geometry of the avatar head, after mapping the outer geometry of the accessory, rotating the outer geometry of the accessory with respect to the spherical inner geometry of the avatar head, or, after the rotating, remapping the outer geometry of the accessory to the inner geometry of the avatar head.
Singh teaches mapping, by the processor, an outer geometry of an accessory for the avatar head to the inner geometry of the avatar head (Singh; 3.2, describes a registration phase that computes a representation of each undeformed point of a bound surface in the local coordinate frame of a reference-surface control element by inverting that element’s transformation matrix. In the combination, the bound surface is the accessory of Makeev and the reference-surface frame is the intermediate inner geometry of the avatar head. This teaches mapping an outer geometry of an accessory for the avatar head to the inner geometry of the avatar head.) after mapping the outer geometry of the accessory, rotating, by the processor, the outer geometry of the accessory with respect to the inner geometry of the avatar head (Singh; 4.1, describes that rotations and translations applied to the entire driver surface are imparted precisely to the bound surface because the deformation weights are normalized. In the combination, rotating the driver surface rotates the mapped accessory relative to the intermediate inner geometry of the avatar head. This teaches, after the mapping, rotating the outer geometry of the accessory with respect to the inner geometry of the avatar head.) after the rotating, remapping, by the processor, the outer geometry of the accessory to the inner geometry of the avatar head (Singh; 3.3, describes a deformation phase that re-expresses each registered point in the coordinate frame of the corresponding driver-surface control element to recover its world-space position. In the combination, this re-expresses the rotated accessory out of the intermediate frame and returns it to the inner geometry of the avatar head. This teaches, after the rotating, remapping the outer geometry of the accessory to the inner geomty of the avatar head, the remapping is based on the rendering of the accessory coupled to the avatar head (Makeev; ¶0090).)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to modify the avatar item-fitting and rendering of Makeev with the register-rotate-remap pipeline as taught by Singh. The motivation for such a combination would have been to provide the benefit of accurate and adjustable accessory placement on the avatar.
However, Makeev in view of Singh does not explicitly disclose the inner geometry, which the accessory’s outer geometry is mapped, with respect to which it is rotated and remapped, is a spherical inner geometry.
Zhang teaches transforming, by a processor, an inner geometry of an avatar head to a spherical inner geometry (Zhang; 3.4.2, describes transforming the head’s vertices from a 3D Cartesian coordinate system to a spherical coordinate system with the nose tip selected as the spherical origin. This teaches transforming an inner geometry of an avatar head to a spherical inner geometry.) Zhang’s spherical coordinate-head is the spherical inner geometry that serves, in the combination, as the intermediate geometry the accessory is mapped to, and rotated, and remapped.
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to further modify the system of Makeev in view of Singh by mapping, rotating, and remapping the spherical head representation of Zhang. Makeev fits items in a normalized coordinate space (Makeev; ¶0068) and Zhang uses a spherical head representation to fit head accessories such as helmets and headphones (Zhang Fig. 1). The motivation for such a combination would have been to provide the benefit of accurate and consistent accessory placement, regardless of head shapes.
Claim 8, has similar limitations as of claim 1, therefore it is rejected under the same rationale as claim 1. Claim 8 additionally recites a non-transitory computer readable medium. Makeev teaches of a non-transitory computer readable medium (¶0012, ¶0208 and ¶0209).
Claim 15, has similar limitations as of claim 1, therefore it is rejected under the same rationale as claim 1.Claim 15 additionally recites a computing device and non-transitory computer readable medium. Makeev teaches of a computing device (¶0044, ¶0114)
Regarding claim 7, Makeev, in view of Singh and Zhang, teaches the computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein: the mapping the outer geometry of the accessory for the avatar head to the spherical inner geometry of the avatar head is performed using a linear deformer (Singh; 3.2, describes computing the representation of each point in a control element’s coordinate frame by inverting that element’s transformation matrix and, Singh; 4.1, describes that affine transformations applied to the deformer are imparted to the bound surface. This teaches that the mapping isperformed by a linear deformer), and the remapping the outer geometry of the accessory to the inner geometry of the avatar head is performed using an inverse-linear deformer (Singh; 3.3, describes recoverin g the world-space position of each point by applying the corresponding driver surface element’s transformation matrix, which is the inverse operation to the matrix inversion of the mapping, teaching that the remapping is performed by an inverse-linear deformer.)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date, to implement the mapping and remapping of Makeev in view of Singh and Zhang using the linear deformer and inverse-linear deformer of Singh. The motivation for such a combination would have been to provide the benefit of accurately restoring the accessory to the avatar head after deformation.
Claim 14, has similar limitations as of claim 7, therefore it is rejected under the same rationale as claim 7.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-6, 8-13, and 16-20 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
Prior art Makeev (US20230124297A1) describes fitting accessory geometry to an avatar by cage-to-cage mapping and rendering the result with hidden surface removal.
Prior art Singh ("Skinning Characters using Surface Oriented Free-Form Deformations.") describes registering an object into a control surface’s coordinate frame and re-expressing it to deform the object.
Prior art Zhang (“3DCMM”) describes transforming head vertices into a spherical coordinate system about a nose-tip origin.
Regarding claim 2, the prior art of record fails to disclose or make obvious calculating a center point of the inner geometry of the avatar head and adjusting vertices of the inner geometry to be a same distance from the center point to transform the inner geometry to the spherical inner geometry. The closest prior art, Zhang, transforms head vertices into a spherical coordinate system about an origin, but does not adjust the vertices to a same distance from a center point of the inner geometry of the avatar head.
Claims 2-6, 8-13, and 16-20 are allowed due to dependency on claims 2, 9, and 16, respectively.
Conclusion
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/DAN F KALHORI/Examiner, Art Unit 2618
/DEVONA E FAULK/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2618
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