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 .
Preliminary Remarks
This is a reply to the application filed on 09/22/2025, in which, claims 1-4 remain pending in the present application with claims 1 and 4 being independent claims.
When making claim amendments, the applicant is encouraged to consider the references in their entireties, including those portions that have not been cited by the examiner and their equivalents as they may most broadly and appropriately apply to any particular anticipated claim amendments.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on September 22, 2025 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97 and is being considered by the Examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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 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 of this title, 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 1-4 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Hirakawa (US 20190219820 A1, hereinafter referred to as “Hirakawa”) in view of Ishimaru (US 20150198483 A1, hereinafter referred to as “Ishimaru”), and further in view of Broadbent et al. (US 20180267326 A1, hereinafter referred to as “Broadbent”).
Regarding claim 1, Hirakawa discloses a stereoscopic display device comprising:
a laser light source configured to emit a laser beam (Hirakawam, paragraph [0056]: “In FIG. 1B, semiconductor lasers RS, GS, and BS, which form a light source, emit laser beams of red, green, and blue (RGB), respectively”);
a converter configured to convert the emitted laser beam to a collimated beam with a predetermined diameter (Hirakawam, paragraph [0062]: “The emitted laser-beam bundle is converted by a lens 102 into a “collimated beam” of prescribed diameter of laser-beam bundle”); and
an intensity control unit configured to control an intensity at the light condensing position on the basis of drawing data indicating a light emission intensity at each position in the drawing space (Hirakawam, paragraph [0065]: “the light-emission intensity of each of the semiconductor lasers RS, GS, and BS may be modulated by a driving unit as a controller according to the image signal of RGB components”).
Regarding claim 1, Hirakawa discloses all the claimed limitations with the exception of a divider configured to divide the collimated beam into a zeroth-order beam and a higher-order beam equal to or higher than a first-order beam by changing a wavefront of the collimated beam; a scanner configured to three-dimensionally scan a light condensing position of a converged beam by using a drawing space including a fluorescent material which is excited to spontaneously emit light with irradiation with a laser beam as a scan target range and changing optical axis directions in which converged beams including the zeroth-order beam and the higher-order beam are emitted and a focal distance at which the zeroth-order beam converges.
Ishimaru from the same or similar fields of endeavor discloses a divider configured to divide the collimated beam into a zeroth-order beam and a higher-order beam equal to or higher than a first-order beam by changing a wavefront of the collimated beam (see Ishimaru, paragraphs [0067]-[0068]: “A measurement beam LS emitted from one measurement point on an object S to be measured is collimated by the objective lens 12 and enters both the first transmissive part 131 and the second transmissive part 132 of the transmissive phase shifter 13. By passing through the first transmissive part 131 and the second transmissive part 132, the measurement beam is divided into a first measurement beam and a second measurement beam, which enter the cylindrical lens 14 ... within the interference area of the first and second measurement beams, the optical path length difference between the two beams gradually changes. Since the measurement beam emitted from each measurement point within the linear measurement area of the object S (see FIG. 3) contains various wavelengths of light, the continuous change in the optical path length difference between the first and second measurement beams within the interference area yields a waveform of the intensity distribution of the interference light”).
Therefore it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to utilize the teachings as in Ishimaru with the teachings as in Hirakawa. The motivation for doing so would ensure the system to have the ability to use the dividing optical system disclosed in Ishimaru to divide measurement beam into a first measurement beam and a second measurement beam and to change the optical path length based on difference between the two beams to yield a waveform of the intensity distribution of the interference light thus dividing the collimated beam into different beams and changing a wavefront of the collimated beam in order to generate higher-order diffraction light so that the collimated beam can be converged.
Regarding claim 1, the combination teachings of Hirakawa and Ishimaru as discussed above disclose all the subject matter of the claimed invention with the exceptions of a scanner configured to three-dimensionally scan a light condensing position of a converged beam by using a drawing space including a fluorescent material which is excited to spontaneously emit light with irradiation with a laser beam as a scan target range and changing optical axis directions in which converged beams including the zeroth-order beam and the higher-order beam are emitted and a focal distance at which the zeroth-order beam converges.
Broadbent from the same or similar fields of endeavor discloses a scanner configured to three-dimensionally scan a light condensing position of a converged beam by using a drawing space (Broadbent, paragraph [0138]: “one or more scanning mechanisms can operate to create beam intersections within an illumination volume of the display 1130, such that the beam intersections occur at addressable locations of the illumination volume. By providing positional or direction control instructions from the processing device 1140 to a laser source, a scanning mechanism, and/or a display, it is possible to position a beam intersection at variable locations in three dimensions throughout the space of an illumination volume”) including a fluorescent material which is excited to spontaneously emit light with irradiation with a laser beam as a scan target range (Broadbent, paragraph [0161]: “The particles may be excited to emit radiation 302 using any of the methods and systems described herein. In a fluorescence-based 3D display, one implementation may be to illuminate the voxels of the volumetric medium sequentially in a 3D vector-scanning approach”) and changing optical axis directions in which converged beams including the zeroth-order beam and the higher-order beam are emitted and a focal distance at which the zeroth-order beam converges (Broadbent, paragraph [0140]: “Computer 1140 can be configured to provide or relay instructions to the scanning mechanism 1120. By changing the intensity and focal position (or beam-overlap position) of the light source, 3-dimensional color images can be produced in real space and changed in time. In this way, 3-dimensional videos can be generated”).
Therefore it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to utilize the teachings as in Broadbent with the teachings as in Hirakawa and Ishimaru. The motivation for doing so would ensure the system to have the ability to use the system and method for controlling angular intensity patterns in a real space 3d image disclosed in Broadbent to create beam intersections within an illumination volume of the display by operating one or more scanning mechanisms; to position a beam intersection at variable locations in three dimensions throughout the space of an illumination volume by providing positional or direction control instructions; to emit radiation; to illuminate the voxels of the volumetric medium sequentially in a 3D vector-scanning approach in a fluorescence-based 3D display; and to produce 3-dimensional color images by changing the intensity and focal position of the light source thus scanning a light condensing position of a converged beam three-dimensionally including a fluorescent material which is excited to spontaneously emit light with irradiation with a laser beam as a scan target range and changing optical axis directions in which converged beams are emitted and a focal distance at which the beam converges in order to change the irradiation direction of the laser beam so that the light condensing position of the converged beam can be controlled.
Regarding claim 2, the combination teachings of Hirakawa, Ishimaru, and Broadbent as discussed above also disclose the stereoscopic display device according to claim 1, wherein the divider is a spatial phase modulator and distributes a focal position of the zeroth-order beam and a focal position of the higher-order beam at positions apart in the optical axis directions at the light condensing position (see Ishimaru, paragraph [0075]: “As shown in the upper part of FIG. 9, when the vertical and horizontal axes on the two-dimensional array device are respectively set as the convergence and interference axes, a distribution of the brightness occurs in the direction of the convergence axis due to the convergence limit of the cylindrical lens. This distribution asymmetrically changes with the amount of temporal shift of the phase. In the present embodiment, the phase difference is spatially given by the transmissive phase shift. Therefore, for example, in the case of the curve L1 in the graph shown in the lower left part of FIG. 9, the brightness is higher on the upper side of the convergence axis, whereas in the case of the curve L2, the brightness is higher on the lower side of the convergence axis”).
The motivation for combining the references has been discussed in claim 1 above.
Regarding claim 3, the combination teachings of Hirakawa, Ishimaru, and Broadbent as discussed above also disclose the stereoscopic display device according to claim 1, wherein the divider is a two-dimensional diffraction grating (see Ishimaru, paragraph [0088]: “the conjugate plane imaging optical system is provided to optically form a conjugate plane of the object S, and additionally, a phase-type diffraction grating, which is a transmissive periodic structure, is placed on the conjugate plane to superpose a periodic texture on the conjugate plane. By this configuration of the present embodiment, the measurement light can be divided into two beams and made to interfere with each other regardless of the texture of the surface of the object S, so that a spectral characteristic can be obtained”) and distributes a focal position of the zeroth-order beam and a focal position of the higher-order beam at positions apart in diameter directions of the converged beams at the light condensing position (see Ishimaru, paragraph [0087]: “in the case of a spatially coherent light, no higher-order light will be generated from the surface of an object which has practically no texture, but only the zeroth-order light results. For example, in the case of Koehler illumination, the zeroth-order light reaches the objective lens 36 in the form of a collimated beam and converges on the optical Fourier-transform plane, so that it is impossible to divide the wave front by the transmissive phase shifter. However, by superposing a periodic texture on the surface of the object S, a distribution of the diffraction light can always be obtained on the optical Fourier-transform plane without being affected by the texture of the object surface, so that the phase-shift interference by the wave-front division can be constantly produced”).
The motivation for combining the references has been discussed in claim 1 above.
Claim 4 is rejected for the same reasons as discussed in claim 1 above.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to NIENRU YANG whose telephone number is (571)272-4212. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 10AM-6PM EST.
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NIENRU YANG
Examiner
Art Unit 2484
/NIENRU YANG/Examiner, Art Unit 2484
/THAI Q TRAN/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2484
