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 .
Priority
This application is a continuation of US Application No. 17/888,786, filed 08/16/2022, which claims the benefit of GR20220100541, filed 07/07/2022.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted is considered by the examiner.
Double Patenting
The nonstatutory double patenting rejection is based on a judicially created doctrine grounded in public policy (a policy reflected in the statute) so as to prevent the unjustified or improper timewise extension of the “right to exclude” granted by a patent and to prevent possible harassment by multiple assignees. A nonstatutory double patenting rejection is appropriate where the conflicting claims are not identical, but at least one examined application claim is not patentably distinct from the reference claim(s) because the examined application claim is either anticipated by, or would have been obvious over, the reference claim(s). See, e.g., In re Berg, 140 F.3d 1428, 46 USPQ2d 1226 (Fed. Cir. 1998); In re Goodman, 11 F.3d 1046, 29 USPQ2d 2010 (Fed. Cir. 1993); In re Longi, 759 F.2d 887, 225 USPQ 645 (Fed. Cir. 1985); In re Van Ornum, 686 F.2d 937, 214 USPQ 761 (CCPA 1982); In re Vogel, 422 F.2d 438, 164 USPQ 619 (CCPA 1970); In re Thorington, 418 F.2d 528, 163 USPQ 644 (CCPA 1969).
A timely filed terminal disclaimer in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(c) or 1.321(d) may be used to overcome an actual or provisional rejection based on nonstatutory double patenting provided the reference application or patent either is shown to be commonly owned with the examined application, or claims an invention made as a result of activities undertaken within the scope of a joint research agreement. See MPEP § 717.02 for applications subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA as explained in MPEP § 2159. See MPEP § 2146 et seq. for applications not subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA . A terminal disclaimer must be signed in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(b).
The filing of a terminal disclaimer by itself is not a complete reply to a nonstatutory double patenting (NSDP) rejection. A complete reply requires that the terminal disclaimer be accompanied by a reply requesting reconsideration of the prior Office action. Even where the NSDP rejection is provisional the reply must be complete. See MPEP § 804, subsection I.B.1. For a reply to a non-final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.111(a). For a reply to final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.113(c). A request for reconsideration while not provided for in 37 CFR 1.113(c) may be filed after final for consideration. See MPEP §§ 706.07(e) and 714.13.
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Claims 1-20 are rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claims 1-5, 7-10, 12-20 of U.S. Patent No. 12,307,564 B2. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because independent claims 1, 16 and 20 are the broader recitations of in dependent claims 1, 17 and 20 of Patent No. 12,307,564 B2. Therefore, claims 1-20 are anticipated by claims 1-5, 7-10, 12-20 of Patent No. 12,307,564 B2 as shown below.
Instant Application
1. A method comprising: presenting a 3D avatar in a virtual environment defined by an AR experience; identifying one or more animation parameters associated with one or more fashion items worn by the 3D avatar, the one or more animation parameters specifying an initial position to display the 3D avatar, a direction along which the 3D avatar is animated as moving, a set of poses that the 3D avatar performs while moving along the direction, and a final position to display the 3D avatar; and in response to identifying the one or more animation parameters, using the one or more animation parameters to modify a pose or movement of the 3D avatar to perform the set of poses along the direction specified by the one or more animation parameters in the virtual environment in which the 3D avatar is presented. (Same limitations as claim 1 of Patent No. ‘564)
2. The method of claim 1, further comprising: accessing, by an application, an image depicting a person; generating, by the application, the 3D avatar based on the person depicted in the image in a real-world environment; receiving input that selects the one or more fashion items to be worn by the 3D avatar; and placing, by the application, the 3D avatar wearing the one or more fashion items in an augmented reality (AR) experience. (Part of the limitations of claim 1 of Patent No. ‘564)
3. The method of claim 1, wherein the 3D avatar is presented in a new pose that is different from a pose of a person depicted in an image, further comprising: receiving a user selection of the AR experience from a list of AR experiences. (Same limitations as claim 2 of Patent No. ‘564)
4. The method of claim 1, wherein the 3D avatar is adjusted to be in any position and to wear any selected fashion item in an automatically fitted manner. (Same limitations as claim 3 of Patent No. ‘564)
5. The method of claim 1, further comprising: activating a camera of a device to capture a real-time video feed depicting a real-world environment; adding one or more AR elements to the real-world environment depicted in the real-time video feed; and displaying a modified real-time video feed comprising the 3D avatar, the one or more AR elements, and the depiction of the real-world environment. (Same limitations as claim 4 of Patent No. ‘564)
6. The method of claim 5, wherein the one or more AR elements correspond to a runway that is part of a modeling show. (Same limitations as claim 5 of Patent No. ‘564)
7. The method of claim 1, further comprising selecting a 3D position in which to place the 3D avatar. (Same limitations as claim 7 of Patent No. ‘564)
8. The method of claim 1, further comprising rigging the 3D avatar based on features of an image. (Same limitations as claim 8 of Patent No. ‘564)
9. The method of claim 1, further comprising: receiving a swipe gesture from a user; and in response to receiving the swipe gesture, modifying the one or more fashion items worn by the 3D avatar. (Same limitations as claim 9 of Patent No. ‘564)
10. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more fashion items include at least one of shirt, pants, skirt, dress, jewelry, purse, furniture item, household item, eyewear, eyeglasses, AR logos, AR emblems, purse, pants, shorts, skirts, jackets, t-shirts, blouses, glasses, jewelry, earrings, bunny ears, a hat, ear muffs, or facial makeup. (Same limitations as claim 10 of Patent No. ‘564)
11. The method of claim 1, further comprising training a neural network to generate the 3D avatar, the neural network configured to establish a relationship between points of an image and points in a volume corresponding to a given 3D avatar. (Same limitations as claim 12 of Patent No. ‘564)
12. The method of claim 11, further comprising: generating a segmentation of a person depicted in the image; applying the neural network to generate a volume reconstruction of the person using the segmentation and to output a texture of the person; and fitting the volume reconstruction and the texture to a 3D avatar template. (Same limitations as claim 13 of Patent No. ‘564)
13. The method of claim 12, further comprising: unposing the 3D avatar template fitted with the volume reconstruction and the texture; and applying an animation to the unposed 3D avatar. (Same limitations as claim 14 of Patent No. ‘564)
14. The method of claim 13, further comprising performing training operations comprising: receiving training data comprising a plurality of training images depicting a training person and ground-truth meshes of the training person; applying the neural network to a first training image of the plurality of training images to estimate a volume reconstruction of the training person depicted in the first training image, the volume reconstruction indicating whether each point of the first training image is inside or outside of a given mesh; obtaining a ground-truth mesh corresponding to the first training image; comparing the volume reconstruction to the ground-truth mesh corresponding to the first training image to compute a deviation; and updating parameters of the neural network based on the computed deviation. (Same limitations as claim 15 of Patent No. ‘564)
15. The method of claim 1, further comprising automatically aligning the one or more fashion items on the 3D avatar. (Same limitations as claim 16 of Patent No. ‘564)
16. A system comprising: at least one processor configured to perform operations comprising: presenting a 3D avatar in a virtual environment defined by an AR experience; identifying one or more animation parameters associated with one or more fashion items worn by the 3D avatar, the one or more animation parameters specifying an initial position to display the 3D avatar, a direction along which the 3D avatar is animated as moving, a set of poses that the 3D avatar performs while moving along the direction, and a final position to display the 3D avatar; and in response to identifying the one or more animation parameters, using the one or more animation parameters to modify a pose or movement of the 3D avatar to perform the set of poses along the direction specified by the one or more animation parameters in the virtual environment in which the 3D avatar is presented. (Same limitations as claim 17 of Patent No. ‘564)
17. The system of claim 16, the operations further comprising: receiving a user selection of an AR experience from a list of AR experiences, wherein different fashion items cause the 3D avatar to be animated in different ways. (Same limitations as claim 18 of Patent No. ‘564)
18. The system of claim 17, the operations further comprising automatically selecting the AR experience from a list of AR experiences. (Same limitations as claim 19 of Patent No. ‘564)
19. The system of claim 16, the operations further comprising automatically aligning the one or more fashion items on the 3D avatar. (Similar limitations as claim 16 of Patent No. ‘564)
20. A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium that includes instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a machine, cause the machine to perform operations comprising: presenting a 3D avatar in a virtual environment defined by an AR experience; identifying one or more animation parameters associated with one or more fashion items worn by the 3D avatar, the one or more animation parameters specifying an initial position to display the 3D avatar, a direction along which the 3D avatar is animated as moving, a set of poses that the 3D avatar performs while moving along the direction, and a final position to display the 3D avatar; and in response to identifying the one or more animation parameters, using the one or more animation parameters to modify a pose or movement of the 3D avatar to perform the set of poses along the direction specified by the one or more animation parameters in the virtual environment in which the 3D avatar is presented. (Same limitations as claim 20 of Patent No. ‘564)
Patent No. 12,307,564 B2
1. A method comprising: accessing, by an application, an image depicting a person; generating, by the application, a three-dimensional (3D) avatar based on the person depicted in the image in a real-world environment; receiving input that selects one or more fashion items to be worn by the 3D avatar; placing, by the messaging application, the 3D avatar wearing the one or more fashion items in an augmented reality (AR) experience; presenting the 3D avatar in a virtual environment defined by the AR experience different from the real-world environment in which the person is depicted in the image used to generate the 3D avatar; identifying one or more animation parameters associated with the one or more fashion items, the one or more animation parameters specifying an initial position to display the 3D avatar, a direction along which the 3D avatar is animated as moving, a set of poses that the 3D avatar performs while moving along the direction, and a final position to display the 3D avatar; and in response to identifying the one or more animation parameters, using the one or more animation parameters to continuously modify a pose or movement of the 3D avatar to perform the set of poses along the direction specified by the one or more animation parameters in the virtual environment in which the 3D avatar is presented.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein the 3D avatar is presented in a new pose that is different from a pose of the person depicted in the image, further comprising: receiving a user selection of the AR experience from a list of AR experiences.
3. The method of claim 1, further comprising automatically selecting the AR experience from a list of AR experiences, wherein the 3D avatar is adjusted to be in any position and to wear any selected fashion item in an automatically fitted manner.
4. The method of claim 1, further comprising: activating a camera of a client device to capture a real-time video feed depicting a real-world environment; adding one or more AR elements to the real-world environment depicted in the real-time video feed; and displaying a modified real-time video feed comprising the 3D avatar, the one or more AR elements, and the depiction of the real-world environment.
5. The method of claim 4, wherein the one or more AR elements correspond to a runway that is part of a modeling show.
7. The method of claim 1, further comprising selecting a 3D position in which to place the 3D avatar.
8. The method of claim 1, further comprising rigging the 3D avatar based on features of the image.
9. The method of claim 1, further comprising: receiving a swipe gesture from a user; and in response to receiving the swipe gesture, modifying the one or more fashion items worn by the 3D avatar.
10. The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more fashion items include at least one of shirt, pants, skirt, dress, jewelry, purse, furniture item, household item, eyewear, eyeglasses, AR logos, AR emblems, purse, pants, shorts, skirts, jackets, t-shirts, blouses, glasses, jewelry, earrings, bunny ears, a hat, ear muffs, or facial makeup.
12. The method of claim 1, further comprising training a neural network to generate the 3D avatar, the neural network configured to establish a relationship between points of an image and points in a volume corresponding to a given 3D avatar.
13. The method of claim 12, further comprising: generating a segmentation of the person depicted in the image; applying the neural network to generate a volume reconstruction of the person using the segmentation and to output a texture of the person; and fitting the volume reconstruction and the texture to a 3D avatar template.
14. The method of claim 13, further comprising: unposing the 3D avatar template fitted with the volume reconstruction and the texture; and applying an animation to the unposed 3D avatar.
15. The method of claim 12, further comprising performing training operations comprising: receiving training data comprising a plurality of training images depicting a training person and ground-truth meshes of the training person; applying the neural network to a first training image of the plurality of training images to estimate a volume reconstruction of the training person depicted in the first training image, the volume reconstruction indicating whether each point of the first training image is inside or outside of a given mesh; obtaining the ground-truth mesh corresponding to the first training image; comparing the volume reconstruction to the ground-truth mesh corresponding to the first training image to compute a deviation; and updating parameters of the neural network based on the computed deviation.
16. The method of claim 1, further comprising automatically aligning the one or more fashion items on the 3D avatar.
17. A system comprising: at least one processor configured to perform operations comprising: accessing, by an application, an image depicting a person; generating, by the application, a three-dimensional (3D) avatar based on the person depicted in the image in a real-world environment; receiving input that selects one or more fashion items to be worn by the 3D avatar; placing, by the application, the 3D avatar wearing the one or more fashion items in an augmented reality (AR) experience; presenting the 3D avatar in a virtual environment defined by the AR experience different from the real-world environment in which the person is depicted in the image used to generate the 3D avatar; identifying one or more animation parameters associated with the one or more fashion items, the one or more animation parameters specifying an initial position to display the 3D avatar, a direction along which the 3D avatar is animated as moving, a set of poses that the 3D avatar performs while moving along the direction, and a final position to display the 3D avatar; and in response to identifying the one or more animation parameters, using the one or more animation parameters to continuously modify a pose or movement of the 3D avatar to perform the set of poses along the direction specified by the one or more animation parameters in the virtual environment in which the 3D avatar is presented.
18. The system of claim 17, the operations further comprising: receiving a user selection of the AR experience from a list of AR experiences, wherein different fashion items cause the 3D avatar to be animated in different ways.
19. The system of claim 17, the operations further comprising automatically selecting the AR experience from a list of AR experiences.
20. A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium that includes instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a machine, cause the machine to perform operations comprising: accessing, by an application, an image depicting a person; generating, by the application, a three-dimensional (3D) avatar based on the person depicted in the image in a real-world environment; receiving input that selects one or more fashion items to be worn by the 3D avatar; placing, by the messaging application, the 3D avatar wearing the one or more fashion items in an augmented reality (AR) experience; presenting the 3D avatar in a virtual environment defined by the AR experience different from the real-world environment in which the person is depicted in the image used to generate the 3D avatar; identifying one or more animation parameters associated with the one or more fashion items, the one or more animation parameters specifying an initial position to display the 3D avatar, a direction along which the 3D avatar is animated as moving, a set of poses that the 3D avatar performs while moving along the direction, and a final position to display the 3D avatar; and in response to identifying the one or more animation parameters, using the one or more animation parameters to continuously modify a pose or movement of the 3D avatar to perform the set of poses along the direction specified by the one or more animation parameters in the virtual environment in which the 3D avatar is presented.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-20 would be allowable if rewritten overcome the Double Patenting rejection set forth in this Office action.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter: the prior art, Choi et al. (US Publication Number 2017/0287060 A1) disclosed a method and an electronic device for composing an image are provided. An electronic device includes a display configured to display an image of a user photographed by a camera; an input component configured to receive a user input; a communicator configured to facilitate a communication with an external server; and a processor configured to display the image of the user on the display, set an avatar region within the image of the user based on the received user input, generate an avatar to be displayed on the avatar region, and control the display to combine the avatar with the image of the user and to display the resulting composite image.
Kim et al. (US Publication Number 2020/0226811 A1) disclosed an electronic device that cause the processor to obtain character data indicating an appearance of an avatar, to obtain asset data indicating a costume or an accessory of the avatar, to generate region information indicating a relationship between a plurality of regions of the appearance of the avatar and a location of the costume or the accessory, and to store the asset data and the region information in the memory.
Smith et al. (US Patent Number 10,896,534 B1) disclosed a system comprising a computer-readable storage medium storing at least one program and a method for transforming a motion style of an avatar from a first style to a second style. The program and method include: retrieving, by a processor from a storage device, an avatar depicting motion in a first style; receiving user input selecting a second style; obtaining, based on the user input, a trained machine learning model that performs a non-linear transformation of motion from the first style to the second style; and applying the obtained trained machine learning model to the retrieved avatar to transform the avatar from depicting motion in the first style to depicting motion in the second style.
However, the prior arts made of record do not teach “presenting a 3D avatar in a virtual environment defined by an AR experience; identifying one or more animation parameters associated with one or more fashion items worn by the 3D avatar, the one or more animation parameters specifying an initial position to display the 3D avatar, a direction along which the 3D avatar is animated as moving, a set of poses that the 3D avatar performs while moving along the direction, and a final position to display the 3D avatar; and in response to identifying the one or more animation parameters, using the one or more animation parameters to modify a pose or movement of the 3D avatar to perform the set of poses along the direction specified by the one or more animation parameters in the virtual environment in which the 3D avatar is presented”, as presented in independent claims 1, 16 and 20. Claims 2-15 would be allowable as they depend on claim 1. Claims 17-19 would be allowable as they depend on claim 16.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communication from the examiner should be directed to Hilina K Demeter whose telephone number is (571) 270-1676.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, King Y. Poon could be reached at (571) 270- 0728. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/HILINA K DEMETER/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2617
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