US 10281275

I'll search for authoritative records on this specific patent number before summarizing.

Let me check for any litigation or CAFC docket activity, and verify the patent's current status.

Summary of US 10,281,275 B2

Caveat on scope: You asked me to search USPTO and CAFC 2026 dockets. I ran web searches for the patent number, the assignee, and litigation/docket activity. The only authoritative technical source I could reach is the Google Patents record (and mirror sites: Justia, FreePatentsOnline, Patents Encyclopedia). I found no CAFC docket entry, district-court complaint, or PTAB proceeding involving patent 10,281,275 or the assignee. I cannot confirm that no such proceeding exists — only that my searches returned nothing, and I do not have authoritative docket data for 2026. Treat the litigation status as "no activity found," not "confirmed clean."

Bibliographic data (literal)

Abstract (as issued)

An arrangement for optically capturing a space from a plurality of directions has first deflection elements for deflecting optical rays, a second deflection element, and a camera arranged downstream from the second deflection element. At least three first deflection elements are arranged mutually spaced apart on a plane and aligned to direct optical rays (referred to as partial images) that are incident in parallel from different directions to the second deflection element (a "splitter"). The splitter deflects the partial images back substantially in their original direction of radiation and into the capture range of the camera.

Technical gist

Rather than using multiple synchronized cameras for stereo/multi-view capture (expensive, hard to synchronize, computationally heavy), the invention uses one camera and passive optics. Parallel light from several directions hits spaced-apart first deflection elements (prisms/mirrors) on a plane; each reflects its view to a central faceted "splitter" (e.g., a three- or four-sided pyramid); the splitter sends each partial image back roughly along its original direction, laterally offset, into the single camera. The result is a single sensor image tiled with 3–4 partial views, enabling position determination in an unknown space without the "drift" of sensor-only tracking. The spec favors three or four first deflection elements as a compromise between positional precision and computational load. Embodiments include a snap-on attachment/holding fixture for a phone or tablet camera, converging lenses (optionally displaceable for camera adaptation), deliberately distorting lenses to optically pre-compensate aberrations, and augmented-reality / head-worn display uses.

Independent claims — plain language

The patent has 11 claims, but only one independent claim (claim 1). Claims 2–11 are all dependent. (Claim 11 also shows a typographical artifact, "holding fixture-of the attachment.")

Claim 1 — An arrangement with:

1. Multiple first deflection elements for deflecting light, plus a second deflection element, and a camera downstream of the second deflection element;
2. the first deflection elements are spaced apart on a plane and oriented so parallel rays arriving from different directions are directed to the second deflection element;
3. the second deflection element is configured to deflect those rays back substantially in their original direction of travel, into the camera's capture range;
4. the first and second deflection elements sit in a holding fixture that is an attachment for the camera and includes a receptacle; and
5. the camera is part of a mobile electronic device with a display, and the holding fixture includes at least one lens positioned in front of the display, relative to a user.

Two drafting points worth flagging: (a) claim 1 says "a plurality," not "at least three" — even though the abstract and specification emphasize at least three; (b) element 5 is the AR/head-worn embodiment elevated into the sole independent claim, tying the claim to a mobile-device display and a lens in front of that display.

Representative dependent claims: three or four first deflection elements (2); equal spacing on a circular path centered on the splitter (3–4); a converging lens between splitter and camera bundling parallel rays into the objective (5–6); displaceable/fixable lens for camera adaptation (7); a lens between a first deflection element and the splitter (8); and lenses intentionally shaped to produce distortion that compensates for optical distortion elsewhere in the path (9–10); mobile device being a phone/phablet/tablet with the fixture securing it (11).

Prior art cited

US 3,055,265 A and US 3,144,806 A (both cited in the background as "family cites"), plus examiner-cited references including US 2004/0264013 A1, US 2010/0045773 A1, FR 2982377 A1, US 2013/0127997 A1, WO 2014/017409 A1, DE 202012008568 U1, US 2015/0296139 A1, and FR 2150221 A1. One non-patent citation: the International Search Report for PCT/EP2015/063200 dated Sep. 10, 2015. One later family citation: WO 2018/149488 A1 (Nokia Technologies Oy).

Uncertainty notes

• No CAFC/ITC/PTAB/litigation record located for this patent number; I have no authoritative 2026 docket data.
• The assignee name appears in multiple variant spellings across sources; I have not verified the current recorded owner of the US patent beyond the Google Patents assignment entry to SHOOGEE GMBH & CO. KG (recorded 2016-12-20).
• All claim language above is quoted/paraphrased from the Google Patents full text provided; I did not independently re-verify against the USPTO PatentCenter facsimile, which would be the definitive check for claim text and current fee status.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10281275 across patent litigation databases.

Initial results are mostly false positives (other patents like the '277 and '825). Let me search more targeted sources, including the patent owner Shoogee.

Litigation Search — US Patent 10,281,275

Bottom line

No litigation involving US Patent 10,281,275 could be identified. Based on the searches I ran (including the Unified Patents litigation portal, PlainSite, and general docket/web sources), there is no record of this patent having been asserted in any district court, ITC action, PTAB proceeding, or CAFC appeal.

What I searched and what I found

The only hit referencing this patent

The lone result tied to the patent number was a PlainSite attorney page for Kegler Brown, which lists a record dated 12/20/2016 for client "Shoogee, GmbH &." referencing document 15318327 and patent 10281275, titled "Arrangement For Optically Capturing…". This is an assignment / prosecution record (consistent with the USPTO assignment recorded 2016‑12‑20, Reel/Frame 041033/0372, assigning inventor Arne Voigtländer's rights to Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG), not a litigation filing. Notably, that same PlainSite page also displays the title "Reservation Signal For Transmission…" against some of its entries, indicating the page mixes unrelated scraped data — so it should be treated cautiously and not as evidence of any suit.

Caveats on completeness

• I was able to surface the Unified Patents portal in search results but could not directly load the patent-specific litigation caselist page for 10281275 before hitting my search limit. My conclusion rests on the absence of any indexed litigation record rather than a confirmed "zero results" from the portal itself.
• The patent is owned by Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG (Germany), a small entity without a public track record of patent assertion. That further supports (but does not prove) the absence of litigation.
• No IPR/PGR appears in the record either; the "Family Cites Families" list shows only a later Nokia application (WO2018149488A1) citing this family — a citation, not an invalidity challenge.

Recommendation to confirm

For a definitive negative, the following should be run directly (I could not complete them here):

1. Unified Patents litigation portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist?patents=10281275
2. PACER / Docket Alarm docket search on patent number 10281275
3. USPTO PTAB (PTAB E2E / Patent Center) for any IPR/PGR/CBM naming the patent
4. CAFC docket search for any appeal referencing the patent

If you'd like, I can target any one of these directly on a follow-up.

I'll verify the structured data against public sources before drafting.

Let me probe a few more angles — assignee-name trial searches and district court activity that could signal a petition.

Two more targeted checks — litigation history and the family's other-jurisdiction outcomes.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US10281275: 0 — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBM reviews. There are therefore zero claims invalidated, zero sustained in an FWD, zero settlements, and zero institution denials; the USPTO Open Data Portal structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block returns an empty set, and my independent web searches (patent number, patentee name, and counterpart identifiers) surfaced no AIA trial filings. Bottom line for a defendant: this patent has never been tested at the Board. That is not the same as "hardened" — it means there is no IPR estoppel against anyone, no prior PTAB claim construction to live under, and no petitioner's expert record already built for you. You would be the first mover, with a clean § 315(e)(2) slate but also without a ready-made invalidity roadmap.

Critical caveat: absence of PTAB activity is a negative finding, not a verified fact. The ODP has an ingest lag, and my search coverage of ptacts.uspto.gov / Docket Alarm was not exhaustive. Before relying on this, run a docket-number-agnostic search of PTAB E2E by patent number (US10281275), by patentee (Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG, Münster, DE), and by inventor (Arne Voigtländer), and confirm no petition is in the pre-institution pipeline.

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No proceedings to report

Because the structured source lists none, there are no proceeding numbers, panels, grounds, institution decisions, FWDs, settlements, or appeals to describe. I will not manufacture any. What follows is the surrounding record that is verifiable and that materially informs a defendant's posture.

Patent data (verified against the Google Patents record for US10281275B2):

Verbatim claim-1 scope is narrow and device-specific — this matters more than usual given no IPR history:

"…wherein the plurality of first deflection elements and the second deflection element are arranged in a holding fixture, the holding fixture including an attachment for the camera and a receptacle, wherein the camera is a component of a mobile electronic device with a display, the holding fixture including at least one lens placed in front of the display relative to a user."

Claim 1 therefore requires a smartphone/tablet-attachment combination with a lens in front of the device display. Dependent claims 2–10 add the three-or-four deflection element count, circular-path geometry, displaceable converging lens, and intentionally distorting lenses. See US10281275B2 on Google Patents.

Family status — the patentee is not defending this family aggressively:

• DE102014108317B4 — status "not_active / Expired - Fee Related." The German counterpart has lapsed for non-payment of fees.
• EP3155480A1 — status "not_active / Withdrawn." The European application was abandoned; it never reached grant.
• WO2015189403A1 — status "not_active / Ceased."
• US15/318,327 — the only live member of the family.

That asymmetry is the single most useful signal here: a patentee that let the DE and EP siblings go is preserving the US case for a reason. Given the 2022 maintenance-fee payment (small entity), the most likely explanations are US-only monetization or a US-only product line.

No defensive aggregator in the chain. Unified Patents, RPX, and similar entities do not appear in the record for this patent. Nothing suggests a third party has pre-paid an invalidity attack for the benefit of the industry.

Forward-looking art flag (not a proceeding). The one family-citing publication is WO2018149488A1 (Nokia Technologies Oy, priority 2017-02-14, published 2018-08-23), "An optical arrangement for focusing images of a three-dimensional space from different perspectives onto one or more camera sensors." It post-dates the 2014 priority date, so it is not prior art — but it confirms the general architecture is commercially pursued by large entities, which is a fact pattern that tends to generate IPR activity later. If you are a defendant, assume the patentee is monitoring that space.

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Strategic summary

Claim status across the patent: all 11 claims are UNTESTED. No claim of US10281275 has been canceled, confirmed, or even construed by the Board. Claims 1–11 all remain presumptively valid under § 282, and the full pre-AIA/AIA presumption attaches to every limitation. The only narrowing to date is intrinsic — the "mobile electronic device with a display" plus "lens placed in front of the display relative to a user" limitations that appear in the issued claim 1 and were evidently added during prosecution to distinguish the cited art (the examiner cited eight references, including US 2004/0264013 A1 (Matsuki), US 2010/0045773 A1 (Ritchey), and US 2015/0296139 A1 (Onyenobi), per the Google Patents citation list). Because claim 1 was narrowed on the merits, prosecution history estoppel is likely available against the patentee on the surrendered scope — if the patentee argues claim 1 covers a generic multi-deflection-element camera attachment without the display-lens feature, you have a strong argument that it gave that scope up. Also worth noting: the 11-claim set has structural irregularities (claim 10 appears to restate the distortion limitation already in claim 9, and claim 11 contains a typographical artifact, "holding fixture-of the attachment"), so if you need a validity challenge, the dependent-claim packaging is not immaculate.

Estoppel landscape: completely open. Because no IPR, PGR, or CBM has ever been filed, § 315(e)(2) estoppel runs against nobody. Every prior-art ground remains available to you — including grounds a hypothetical earlier petitioner "reasonably could have raised." There is no petitioner privy chain, no real-party-in-interest web, and no joint-defense-group estoppel to route around. Equally, there is no successful petitioner playbook to copy, no Board claim construction you can lean on, and no FWD factual findings you can cite. You would be building the § 103 combination from scratch.

Procedural posture — what you can actually file, and the clock:

• PGR: unavailable. Post-grant review is limited to petitions filed within 9 months of grant (§ 321(c)). The patent granted 2019-05-07; that window closed 2020-02-07. Claim 1 was limited only by written description / prior art-type grounds anyway.
• CBM: unavailable. The AIA transitional CBM program (AIA § 18) sunset for new petitions on 2020-09-16, and independently the patent's 2014 priority date places it outside the § 18(d)(1) "pre-March 16, 2013" financial-services eligibility.
• IPR: available, and the § 315(b) clock has not started. Section 315(b) bars an IPR petition more than one year after service of a complaint alleging infringement. I found no district court or ITC suit asserting this patent (no Shoogee docket surfaced in my searches). A mere demand letter does not trigger § 315(b). So if you have received only correspondence, you can file immediately or wait — but you must file within one year of any complaint being served. New IPRs are limited to § 102/§ 103 grounds on patents and printed publications (§ 311(b)); § 112 is off the table in an IPR.
• The patent's own date is your best lever. The 2014-06-12 priority date means the § 102 universe is pre-Alice-era machine-vision and catadioptric-optics art. The patent itself concedes U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,055,265 and 3,144,806 (both to Rowe E. Carney Jr.) as generic arrangements — these are cited by the family, i.e., the patentee's own admissions, and they are prime § 103 starting points. US 3,055,265 in particular is admitted to disclose "first and second deflection elements for deflecting optical rays striking the first deflection elements from different directions."

Pattern signals: essentially none, which is itself the finding. No repeat petitioner (there is no petitioner at all). No PTAB appeals by the patentee (nothing to appeal). No defensive aggregator. The patentee has instead let both foreign siblings lapse while maintaining only the US member. For a defendant, the practical read is: this is an unexercised asset. It has never been litigated and never been attacked, so its actual strength is unproven, and the narrow issued claim 1 — anchored to a phone-mounted display lens — gives you real design-around space even before you reach invalidity.

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Recommended next steps

1. Verify the negative before you rely on it. Search PTAB E2E by patent number at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ and confirm no petition is pending institution. Search CourtListener for the patent number and for Shoogee: https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%2210281275%22. Also check the USPTO Patent Center transaction history for any post-grant filings or assignment changes since 2022.

2. No FWD to link to. There is no Final Written Decision, no institution decision, and no Federal Circuit docket on this patent. Any assertion that a claim of US10281275 has been canceled or sustained would be false — I found no such record and will not supply one.

3. If you are a defendant and have been served with a complaint, diarize a hard § 315(b) date at complaint service + 365 days. That is your IPR deadline. Evaluate whether to file in parallel with, or as an alternative to, district-court invalidity contentions (weigh Fintiv-style discretion, though the Board's current practice has shifted back toward instituting on strong merits).

4. Build the § 103 case around the patentee's own admissions. Lead with US 3,055,265 and US 3,144,806 (admitted arrangements), then combine with the examiner-cited art (Matsuki US 2004/0264013; Ritchey US 2010/0045773) and any pre-2014 mobile-camera-attachment or periscope/folded-optics references. Target the "three or four first deflection elements … on a circular path" and "S-shaped/Z-shaped ray path" recitations, which are the clearest candidates for routine-engineering obviousness.

5. Exploit the claim-1 narrowing via prosecution history estoppel in district court. Pull the US15/318,327 file wrapper and chart exactly which limitations were added to overcome the cited art. Then hold the patentee to them — the "lens placed in front of the display relative to a user" requirement in particular is a strong non-infringement hook for any product that mounts optics on the camera side of a device.

6. Watch the maintenance-fee window. As a small entity, the patentee owed the 7.5-year maintenance fee at roughly 2026-11-07 (six months after the 3.5-year-past-4-year mark). If that fee goes unpaid, the patent lapses and this entire analysis becomes moot — check Patent Center for the fee status before spending on an IPR.

One honest limitation: I could not independently confirm the absence of a recently filed, not-yet-indexed petition. Treat "no PTAB activity on file" as the best-supported answer from the sources available to me, not as a certified null result.

I'll verify the assignment record against public sources before drafting.

Let me dig into the assignee's business status and check for any further recordings.

Let me check for any post-2016 transfers and the assignee's current corporate status.

Inventors

Arne Voigtländer — sole named inventor (rendered "VOIGTLANDER, ARNE" in the assignment record; the umlaut is dropped in USPTO data).

• Employer at filing: Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG. He is a co-founder and, per the German commercial register (Amtsgericht Münster HRA 9113), the managing director of the complementary limited partner, Shoogee Verwaltungs-GmbH, which exists solely to be the general partner of Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG. His authorship affiliation on a 2015–2016 RL paper is "Arne Voigtländer, Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG, Krögerweg 16a, D-48155 Münster" — an earlier company address consistent with the register's 2011–2012 address history.
• He is also sole managing director of Shoogee Inc., a Delaware corporation (articles dated 2009-12-01) with a German branch registered at Münster. This entity is not in the chain of title for US10281275 — flagging it only because it is the one Delaware vehicle with a common principal connected to this patentee, and it appears in the register alongside Shoogee Verwaltungs-GmbH.

Pattern check — no anomaly: there was no multi-inventor team to dissipate. The inventor assigned to his own company roughly 2.5 years after the 2014-06-12 priority filing, at the time of US national-phase entry. He remains associated with Shoogee in the register as of the most recent entries (last register change 2025-09-26). Not present: the "all inventors departed within 12 months" precursor to a fire-sale.

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Original assignee

Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG (Amtsgericht Münster HRA 9113; EUID DER2713.HRA9113), Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Partially, and this is the interesting part. Shoogee's line of business is IT consulting, software development, and VR hardware. Its flagship hardware product was the Durovis Dive, a smartphone-holder VR headset brought to international market in 2013 and described in period coverage as the first of its kind; revenue was hardware-led. Its managing director publicly described work on "integration of the camera, to combine current AR apps with full virtual reality," citing latency and smartphone hardware limits as obstacles.

The patent's claim 1 requires exactly that combination: a holding fixture that is an attachment for the camera of a mobile electronic device with a display, with at least one lens in front of the display relative to the user — i.e., a phone-in-a-holder with optics between the eye and the screen. That is the Durovis Dive architecture plus the camera-deflection optics. So the assignee is a genuine operating company in the product space, but I found no evidence of a commercial product that implements the four-deflection-element/splitter/attachment combination claimed; the Dive appears to have been a lens-only viewer. Treat "ships an infringing or embodying product" as unclear, leaning no.

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Assignment timeline

The US patent has exactly one recorded assignment. The Google Patents "Legal Events" table for US10281275B2 shows a single AS / Assignment entry; the post-2016 events (2019-03-27 issue-fee payment, 2019-04-17 patent grant, 2022-07-14 maintenance fee) are not conveyances and do not change title.

2016-12-16 (executed) / recorded 2016-12-20 — Reel 041033 / Frame 0372

• Conveyance: Assignment — "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS' INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)" (USPTO event code AS; PlainSite/assignment abstract caption: "Assignment Of Assignors Interest")
• Assignor: Voigtlander, Arne (sole inventor)
• Assignee: Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG, Hötteweg 8, 48143 Münster, Germany
• Correspondent: Kegler Brown, 65 E State Street, Suite 1800, Columbus, OH 43215. Flag: Kegler Brown appears on PlainSite's attorney/firm index with 88 patent assignments and 332 trademark assignments — i.e., it is a full-service Columbus firm doing volume prosecution and recordation work, not a specialist NPE-recording shop. It appears on this chain once only, and there is no second link for it to recur on. No recurrence signal.
• Context: Ordinary inventor-to-employer acquisition, executed to perfect title in the applicant before US national-phase entry of PCT/EP2015/063200. Standard prosecution hygiene, not a fire-sale, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

No post-issuance (post-2019-05-07) assignment, security agreement, merger, change of name, license, or release is recorded. There is no evidence in the record that title ever left Shoogee. Note also that the family's other members lapsed (DE102014108317B4 expired fee-related; EP3155480A1 withdrawn; WO2015189403A1 ceased) but that is a status/annuity matter, not a title transfer — no assignment of those rights to a third party appears in the US record, and I did not locate one elsewhere.

Data-integrity flags on the record itself (relevant because the same record is being read by downstream analysts):

1. The PlainSite mirror of Assignment 41033/372 lists "Patent Application No. 15318327, Filed December 12, 2016." That is the § 371 national-stage entry date, not the application's filing date. The PCT was filed 2015-06-12; Google Patents gives the filing date as 2015-06-12. Do not propagate "filed 2016-12-12."
2. The same PlainSite attorney page displays "Reservation Signal For Transmission…" against some rows of the same date/client — the page merges unrelated scraped rows. Only the 10281275 / 20170122732 / 15318327 rows are usable.
3. Google Patents renders the assignee as "Shoogee & Co KG GmbH" and "Shoogee Gmbg & Co KG" in the Current Assignee field. Both are garbled renderings of Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG; the assignment record itself and the German register confirm the correct form.

Verification gap (stated plainly): assignmentcenter.uspto.gov is a JavaScript application and I could not load a patent-number-keyed result set directly; my confirmation of "exactly one recorded assignment" rests on the Google Patents legal-events table plus the PlainSite rendering of the underlying USPTO assignment document 41033/372, both of which agree. The definitive check remains a patent-number search at the Assignment Center (see below). If a second, later recording exists, it is not indexed in either source I could reach.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10281275
    2014 : Priority filing DE 102014108317
         : Inventor Arne Voigtlaender
    2015 : PCT filed by Shoogee
    2016 : Inventor assigns to Shoogee GmbH Co KG
         : Recorded reel 041033 frame 0372
    2017 : Pre grant publication US 20170122732
    2019 : Patent granted US 10281275 B2
    2022 : 4th year maintenance fee paid
    2026 : Title unchanged Shoogee still owner

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The single transfer runs from the natural-person inventor to an operating German GmbH & Co. KG — the opposite direction from the pattern. No "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" assignee appears. The assignee's registered object is trade and IT services, it has a real German commercial-register footprint (HRA 9113) with year-over-year address and officer updates, and it ships hardware. Reel 041033/0372 names "Shoogee, GmbH &." with a street address in Münster, not a registered-agent service address.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignee in the chain appears on any public NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). Shoogee is a sub-10-employee Münster IT/VR firm with no litigation history surfaced. This is consistent with the prior sections' finding that the patent has never been asserted and has zero PTAB proceedings.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present. Only one assignment exists, so recurrence is impossible by construction, and the single correspondent (Kegler Brown, 65 E State Street, Suite 1800, Columbus, OH 43215; reel 041033/0372, recorded 2016-12-20) is a general-practice Columbus firm with a broad book of patent and trademark recordations. One appearance is not a finding, and here there is not even a second link.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. Exactly one link, executed 2016-12-16. No chained LLCs, no common-correspondent cluster, no transfers within 24 months of each other, because there is no second transfer.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. The only assignment predates issuance by ~2.4 years (executed 2016-12-16; granted 2019-05-07), and no infringement suit naming this patent has been identified. There is no suit for the assignment to have been timed against.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG is listed Aktiv in the German register with a 2025-09-26 change entry; no Insolvenzverfahren, liquidation, or Löschung appears. No Chapter 7/11 analogue. (Contrast: the foreign siblings lapsed on fees — DE102014108317B4 "Expired – Fee Related," EP3155480A1 "Withdrawn," WO2015189403A1 "Ceased" — but lapsing is not a bankruptcy sale.)

7. Privateering — not present. No transfer to any NPE, and no SEC-filing or Patent Progress / EFF coverage linking Shoogee to assertion campaigns. Shoogee is a private German KG with no SEC reporting obligation.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present. No RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN entity appears anywhere in the chain. The patent is not neutralized — it remains with the original operating owner.

Watch item, offered as an observation and not as a finding: Shoogee's corporate group includes a Delaware corporation with the same principal (Shoogee Inc., articles 2009-12-01, registered with a Münster branch). A Delaware vehicle with a single common officer is the structural form a later transfer-to-asserter would take. There is no recorded assignment to it, and I am not inferring one. Marking signal 1 "not present" is based on reel 041033/0372 being the only entry, not on the absence of a vehicle.

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Verdict

Insufficient data.

The record contains exactly one assignment — inventor Arne Voigtländer to Shoogee GmbH & Co. KG, executed 2016-12-16 and recorded 2016-12-20 at Reel 041033 / Frame 0372 — which is the original employer acquisition, with no post-issuance transfer of any kind. That is the textbook definition of the "only the original assignment" branch of this verdict category. No NPE signal is present on the evidence: the assignee is an active German operating company per HRA 9113 (still "Aktiv," last change 2025-09-26), the correspondent (Kegler Brown) appears once and is a general-practice firm, no known asserter or defensive aggregator is in the chain, and no suit or PTAB proceeding exists against which any transfer could be pre-positioned. The honest read is therefore ordinary operating-company ownership that has never been asserted — not a troll chain, but also not enough activity to score as an "operating-company assertion," which requires the patentee to actually be suing competitors.

Verify at the USPTO Assignment Center: patent-number search for 10281275 at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (legacy interface: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Search both the patent number and the application number 15/318,327, since pre-issue recordations are sometimes indexed only to the application. Two residual uncertainties I could not close: (i) whether any recording exists that is not indexed in Google Patents or PlainSite, and (ii) the exact correspondents block as printed on the recorded document — I have the firm name and address from a secondary mirror, not from the Assignment Center's own correspondent field.

I'll verify the patent record and then research each cited reference individually.

Now the remaining cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 10,281,275 B2 ("Arrangement for optically capturing a space from a plurality of directions")

Preliminary notes, caveats, and one flagged contradiction

1. Date conflict (flagging explicitly). This task states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," but the system context for this session says today is 2026-09-29, and the previously generated sections of this analysis are all dated to 2026-09-29 (including a maintenance-fee window of "~2026-11-07"). I am treating the 2026-09-29 date as operative per the session context, but flagging the inconsistency because one prior section's fee-deadline arithmetic depends on it.

2. USPTO database access. I could not query USPTO PatentCenter or PTAB E2E directly in this session. The authoritative technical source available to me is the Google Patents full-text record for US10281275B2 (fetched 2026-09-24), cross-checked against Justia, FreePatentsOnline, and Patents Encyclopedia mirrors. The patent number, title, claims, and citation lists below are taken literally from that record. Where I say "verified," I mean verified against the Google Patents record — not against the USPTO facsimile image, which remains the definitive check.

3. Search-step limit hit. I completed searches for five of the cited references and was cut off before retrieving content for the remaining ones (FR 2150221 A1, DE 20 2012 008 568 U1, FR 2982377 A1, US 2013/0127997 A1, WO 2014/017409 A1, US 2015/0296139 A1). For those, I give the citation data from the record and characterize the reference only from the title/abstract snippet I did obtain, marking every such characterization as unverified. I will not fabricate claim text or specification content for references I have not read.

4. A source discrepancy worth noting. Google Patents lists the inventor of cited reference US 3,055,265 A as Rowe E Carney Jr., while an independent CPC-classification index page for the same patent lists the inventor as "SMITH TOM F." Both names appear in the historical record of the "Rotoscope" project (Carney and Tom F. Smith jointly obtained the patents). I do not resolve this; the identifier US 3,055,265 A is what matters and I interpret it literally.

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A. Source of the citation list

Per the Google Patents record, US10281275B2 carries:

Two granularities worth recording: on the Google page, only US 2004/0264013 A1, US 2010/0045773 A1, and US 2015/0296139 A1 carry the "*" flag meaning cited by examiner; the remaining five "Citations" are third-party (IDS-style) submissions. The two "Family Cites Families" documents are the ones the applicant itself discussed in the Background of the Invention — i.e., admitted prior art.

The ISR is not prior art. It is a search-report artifact; its only value here is as evidence of what the ISA considered.

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B. The § 102 framework that governs this patent

Because the effective filing date is 2014-06-12 (after the AIA's 2013-03-16 cutoff, via DE 102014108317.2), the AIA § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2) regime applies — not pre-AIA § 102(a)/(b). Two consequences matter:

• Every cited reference published before 2014-06-12 is available under § 102(a)(1) (patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use).
• US 2015/0296139 A1 published 2015-10-15 — after the critical date. It is available only under § 102(a)(2) ("secret prior art"), which requires that it was effectively filed before 2014-06-12. Its earliest date is 2014-04-11, so it does qualify, subject to the § 102(b)(2) exceptions (common ownership / same inventor — neither appears to apply, since the inventors are different and the assignees are unrelated).

The critical structural point for every anticipation analysis

Claim 1 is the only independent claim; claims 2–11 all depend from it. A dependent claim incorporates every limitation of the claim(s) from which it depends. Therefore:

If a reference does not disclose all limitations of claim 1, it cannot anticipate any of claims 2–11 either.

And claim 1 closes with two limitations that post-date the classical panoramic-optics art:

"…wherein the camera is a component of a mobile electronic device with a display, the holding fixture including at least one lens placed in front of the display relative to a user."

A second point that materially widens claim 1's exposure: claim 1 recites "a plurality of first deflection elements," not "at least three." The abstract and specification insist on three or more, but the claim as issued reads on two. So the two-mirror stereo-attachment references below (Breuninger, Philippe, Canon) can satisfy the "plurality" limitation.

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C. The cited references — citation data and description

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D. § 102 anticipation analysis, reference by reference

D.1 — No reference anticipates all of claim 1, and therefore none anticipates claims 2–11

Stating this plainly, because it is the single most important conclusion: because claims 2–11 depend from claim 1, a § 102 case against any claim in this patent must clear claim 1's full limitation set — including the mobile-electronic-device-with-display and lens-in-front-of-the-display limitations. The pre-2010 panoramic/3D-optics citations (items 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9) were plainly cited by the examiner against broader claim scope that was amended away before grant; they do not read on the issued claim 1 on their face. Their value now is as § 103 building blocks and as evidence of the state of the art, not as standalone § 102 references.

D.2 — References that are plausible § 102 candidates for claim 1

US 2010/0045773 A1 (Ritchey) — the strongest § 102(a)(1) candidate

Assessment: this is the only citation that plausibly reaches the whole of claim 1, and the only place where the attack is genuinely arguable is the last row — whether "the display" in claim 1 must be the mobile device's display, and whether the FIG. 29a near-field optics sit "in front of" it. If the patentee argues the claim requires the lens in front of the phone's own display, Ritchey alone likely fails § 102 and becomes an extremely strong § 103 primary reference instead. Either way it is the citation to chart first.

US 2015/0296139 A1 (Onyenobi) — the strongest § 102(a)(2) candidate

A "mobile communication device multidirectional/wide angle camera lens system" is, on its face, directed at the same combination claim 1 recites (mobile device + lens system altering its capture). Its 2014-04-11 effective date precedes the 2014-06-12 critical date, so § 102(a)(2) is available. I could not read the document, so I cannot state that it discloses a spaced-apart first-deflection-element plane and a second deflection element that deflects rays back in their original direction. On the title alone it is a § 103 anchor and a possible § 102(a)(2) reference for the mobile-device limitation. Claim-chart before relying on it.

DE 20 2012 008 568 U1 (Breuninger) — strong on the "attachment" limitations

A stereo attachment for small cameras is, by definition, a holding fixture with a receptacle that attaches to a camera (typically a phone camera) and splits its field into two partial views. It therefore reads directly on claim 1's "attachment for the camera and a receptacle" and on "a plurality of first deflection elements" (two suffices). It almost certainly cannot disclose the second deflection element's "back in the original direction of radiation" geometry, and its status as a utility model (U1) — a German unexamined registration without substantive examination — means the description, not the claims, is the operative disclosure. Full text unverified.

D.3 — References usable against individual claim-1 limitations (best deployed under § 103)

US 2004/0264013 A1 (Matsuki) — reaches limitation (d)/(e) reasonably: a single camera with multiple reflection surfaces, the second reflecting light received from the first, routed to one image-forming system. Its claim 34 — "a plurality of wide-angle imaging optical systems share a single imaging device" — is directly relevant to the "several views, one sensor" concept, and its claim 32's "plurality … arranged so as to produce separate images" is relevant to multiple partial images. It does not disclose a mobile-device camera or a display lens. → § 103, combined with one of items 6/7/10.

FR 2,982,377 A1 (Philippe) and US 2013/0127997 A1 (Canon) — both two-view, single-sensor, folded-optics arrangements. Philippe's "side mirrors … positioned symmetrically with respect to the image sensor axis" is close to claim 1's "spaced apart on a plane … from different directions," and close to dependent claims 3–4's equal-distance/circular-path geometry (though "symmetrical about an axis" is not literally "on a circular path equidistant from the second deflection element"). → § 103 packaging with 6 or 10.

WO 2014/017409 A1 (Ricoh) — § 102(a)(1) as of 2014-01-30. A stereo camera by a major optics manufacturer is circumstantial support that two-view single-sensor capture was routine by the priority date. § 103 secondary reference only.

FR 2,150,221 A1 (Brochard) — I have no verified content. I will not assign it a claim mapping. It is the oldest of the eight and appears in every family's citation list, which usually signals it was the examiner's closest hit against the original broad claims; it should be pulled and read.

US 3,055,265 A and US 3,144,806 A — the "admitted prior art"

These are the most legally useful documents in the record, for a reason unrelated to whether they anticipate:

• The patent's own Background concedes, in the applicant's words: "a generic arrangement … is known from U.S. Pat. No. 3,055,265A that has first and second deflection elements for deflecting optical rays striking the first deflection elements from different directions. A camera is arranged downstream from the deflection elements…" That is a binding applicant admission that limitations (a), (b), (c), and (d) of claim 1 were known.
• The Background then concedes the 3,055,265 arrangement stores "a plurality of partial images … on a film in a predetermined arrangement" different from the real spatial arrangement, which is precisely the multi-partial-image-on-one-sensor premise of the patent.
• US 3,144,806 is conceded to disclose deflection elements in front of a projector, downstream in the optical path, for combining several partial images into one — i.e., the reciprocal of the capture geometry.

Under the AIA these admissions are usable as prior art against the patentee (see the standard doctrine that an applicant's own specification admissions may be treated as admitted prior art). Neither anticipates claim 1 (no mobile device, no display, no in-front-of-display lens; and 3,144,806 is a projection system, not a capture system — the light path runs the other way). But as § 103 starting references for the whole deflection architecture they are close to unassailable, and they are the patentee's own words.

Supplementary lead (not a citation of record — flagged as unverified): a mid-1960s panoramic-camera patent surfaced in my searches that uses an upper reflector reflecting light downward to a lower reflector that reflects it laterally to a film gate — structurally the closest analogue I encountered to "first deflection element → second deflection element → sensor." The source renders its number inconsistently (US 3,214,232 in the page body, but its own claim headers as "3,214,283"). Because the identifier is internally inconsistent in the source, I am not asserting it as prior art; I flag it only as a document to pull and verify.

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E. Ranking of the citations by threat level

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F. What I could not verify, and the checks that would close the gaps

1. Six references unread. FR 2150221 A1, DE 20 2012 008 568 U1, FR 2982377 A1, US 2013/0127997 A1, WO 2014/017409 A1, and US 2015/0296139 A1 were not retrieved (search-step limit). My descriptions of items 6–10 rest on titles and record metadata only. Any § 102 assertion built on them is provisional.
2. Claim text not verified against the USPTO facsimile. The claim-1 language quoted above is from the Google Patents record. Confirm against PatentCenter for US 15/318,327.
3. The one thing that decides the § 102 question is how "the display" in claim 1 is construed — the mobile device's own screen, or any near-field display carried by the fixture. Pull the US15/318,327 file wrapper to see what the examiner was told when the mobile-device/display limitations were added; the prosecution history will also show against which specific cited reference each limitation was added, which tells you which of these eight is the operative one.
4. Then verify the negative on IPR. As the prior sections of this analysis established, no petition has been filed against US10281275, so § 315(e)(2) estoppel binds no one and every ground above remains available — but that also means none of these references has ever been tested by the Board.

Bottom line: the eight examiner/third-party citations are, with one exception (Ritchey, US 2010/0045773 A1), art aimed at the pre-amendment breadth of this family, and none of them on its face anticipates issued claim 1 — because all eleven claims carry claim 1's mobile-device-with-display and in-front-of-display-lens limitations. The realistic posture is a § 103 case built on the Carney admissions (US 3,055,265 / US 3,144,806) as the framework, Matsuki as the single-sensor/multi-view teaching, and Breuninger/Philippe/Canon/Onyenobi as the small-camera-attachment teachings — with Ritchey and Onyenobi as the only two references that could conceivably carry a § 102 count, and only after claim-charting.

I'll gather details on the key prior-art references before building the § 103 combinations.

Let me gather the remaining key references, especially art bearing on the display-lens limitation.

Obviousness Analysis — US 10,281,275 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

This section builds on the earlier summary, litigation, and PTAB sections. It does not repeat the bibliographic record or the finding that no AIA trial has ever been filed. One point from the earlier sections is carried forward and relied on below: no IPR/PGR/CBM exists, so every § 102/§ 103 ground in this analysis remains fully available — there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel running against any party.

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1. Legal framework and level of ordinary skill

Governing statute. Application 15/318,327 was filed 2015-06-12 (national phase of PCT/EP2015/063200), claiming priority to DE 102014108317.2 filed 2014-06-12. It never had a pre-March-2013 filing date, so AIA § 102/§ 103 governs. The critical date for the § 102 universe is therefore 2014-06-12 (the earliest claimed effective filing date).

Level of ordinary skill. Based on the field (folded/panoramic optics, camera adapters) and the claimed subject matter, a POSITA here would be a person with a bachelor's degree in optical engineering, physics, or mechanical engineering and roughly 2–3 years of experience designing catadioptric or panoramic optical assemblies, or equivalent experience. This matters because § 103 motivation must be assessed from this person's perspective — someone comfortable with mirror/prism folding, relay lenses, and image-plane budgeting, but not necessarily a lens designer of ordinary skill in aberration theory at the highest level.

Analogous art. Every reference below is either (a) in the identical field of endeavor (camera attachments/adapter optics that put multiple partial images on one image plane), or (b) reasonably pertinent to the problem the inventor faced — capturing a space from multiple directions with one camera, without multiple sensors or sensor-fusion drift. These are the two prongs of the In re Bigio / In re Clay test and, on these facts, both are easily satisfied. There is no serious non-analogous-art defense available against the core references.

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2. What the claim actually requires, and where the prior-art "gaps" are

Claim 1 has five limitations. I have restated them verbatim from the issued text and identified the narrowest point of novelty for each:

Two construction points materially change the obviousness calculus and both cut against the patentee:

• "A plurality" means two or more. The claim does not say "at least three," even though the abstract and the specification repeatedly emphasize three or more. Construed literally and consistent with § 112 ¶ 6 (which this element does not invoke), two deflection elements satisfy the claim. This broadens claim 1 beyond everything the specification touts as inventive and squarely exposes it to two-image stereoscopic-adapter prior art.
• The "back in their original direction" (S/Z-shaped ray path) element is the only technically distinctive optical requirement. Everything else is a known combination of known adapter geometry.

I flag one item from the earlier sections: the prior section stated the display-lens limitation "was evidently added during prosecution to distinguish the cited art." That is an inference, not a verified fact — I have not pulled the 15/318,327 file wrapper. It matters here, because if the examiner did confront the display-lens element with art, that art is worth obtaining; if the examiner did not (i.e., it was in the original claims and simply never searched well), then the display-lens element is untested and my Combination C below is the most likely locus of a new ground. Verify before relying on either branch.

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3. The reference set and what each one actually teaches

Deliberate omission / admitted art. Note the provenance asymmetry: US 3,055,265 and US 3,144,806 appear on the Google Patents record under "Family Cites Families," not as examiner citations — and both are discussed by the patentee in the patent's own Background. That makes them applicant admissions, the strongest evidentiary form of prior art, and they cannot be antedated by swearing behind them.

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4. The core combinations

Combination A (strongest): DE 202012008568 U1 (Breuninger) in view of US 2010/0045773 A1 (Ritchey)

Breuninger is the closest single reference and supplies claim 1's distinctive geometry. Map it against claim 1:

• First deflection elements on a plane, spaced apart, receiving incident light from different directions → Breuninger's Umlenkspiegel 1 (8b), one per optical path, laterally spaced.
• Directing those rays to a second deflection element → rays are "deflected toward the middle" (¶ [0012]).
• Second deflection element deflecting the rays back substantially in their original direction and into the camera → Breuninger's Umlenkspiegel 2 (8c), which turns the inboard-travelling rays and projects them onto the camera objective (9) and chip (10). This is precisely the claimed S/Z-shaped, laterally-offset, return-along-original-direction path.
• Holding fixture with attachment + receptacle → Breuninger Figs. 4b and 6: an attachment mounted onto the camera; the DE publication describes it as an Aufsatz placed on a camera and, in Fig. 6, on the objective of a mobile telephone camera.
• Camera is a component of a mobile electronic device → expressly disclosed ("wie sie z. B. in handelsüblichen Mobiltelefonen verbaut sind," ¶ [0009]).

What Breuninger does not show is (i) three-or-more images (it is a two-image stereoscopic attachment), and (ii) the "lens in front of the display" element. Ritchey cures (i) directly: he discloses the same architecture with two, and expressly four, objective/deflection elements feeding a single image plane — his Figs. 15/16 and [0100] ("one, two, or four images may be recorded in a single frame") — and he supplies the mount/housing claim language essentially verbatim (his claim 1: "housing means including support means to hold the optical means and mounting means that attaches the panoramic optical system to an adjacent camera").

Why the POSITA would combine them:

1. Both references are directed to the same problem and the same field — fitting a wide/multi-directional field of view onto one existing consumer camera via an add-on optical attachment. That alone supplies the KSR "familiar element performing the same function" rationale.
2. Ritchey supplies the express motivation the patentee claims as its own insight. The patent's stated advantage is avoiding multiple cameras, their cost, and their synchronization problems. Ritchey says the identical thing, in the identical words, five years earlier: "using more than one camera is typically more expensive than using a single camera. And plural camera systems require more parts and are technically more challenging to manufacture" ([0012]). When the asserted advantage is already recited as the motivation in the prior art, there are no unexpected results to weigh.
3. Breuninger identifies its own limitation that Ritchey solves. Breuninger's stated problem is compactness and beam-path obstruction (¶¶ [0008], [0020] — the overlapping mirror geometry of Fig. 5 "behindert den Strahlengang und die Abbildung"), addressed there only by switching to a solid prism (Fig. 6). Ritchey's design uses offset right-angle prisms precisely to avoid the "single depth-of-field along the angled mirrors" focusing defect ([0055], [0059]) and to keep the images on a flat plane perpendicular to the camera axis. That is a teachings-complement motivation, the strongest form of KSR rationale.
4. The result is predictable. Putting N partial images side-by-side on one sensor by angular folding is a mechanical/optical packaging exercise with a known, predictable outcome. Ritchey demonstrates the workability of exactly two and four images at the priority date.
5. No teaching away. Nothing in either reference disparages a second deflection stage or plural deflection elements. Breuninger's move to a prism is a preference for a single component, not a disclaimer of two-stage reflectors.

Reasonable expectation of success is high because Ritchey is a working prototype ("Photograph of working prototype … mounted on a conventional Canon HV10," Fig. 8) of the same architecture applied to the same class of camera.

Combination B (alternative, anchoring on the patentee's own admissions): US 3,055,265 (Carney) in view of DE 202012008568 (Breuninger) and US 2010/0045773 (Ritchey)

Even if a tribunal credits Breuninger with less than I do, Carney '265 is admitted art and independently supplies elements 1–4 plus the numerical and geometric limitations:

• The patentee admits '265 is "a generic arrangement for optically capturing a space from a plurality of directions" having "first and second deflection elements for deflecting optical rays striking the first deflection elements from different directions," with a camera downstream. That is claim 1 elements 1–3, admitted.
• '265's 180° view divided into four sectors with a pair of mirrors in front of each directly reads on claim 2 (three or four elements) and pre-empts any argument that "four" is inventive.
• '265's centro-symmetrical layout — the sectional objectives and lenses "arranged" with "the axis of symmetry being the optical axis" — reads on the claim 3/4 "circular path lying at equal distances" limitation almost verbatim.

The only thing '265 does not supply is the mobile-device-with-display packaging. Breuninger and Onyenobi supply that; Ritchey supplies the adapter-mount and four-image-single-sensor embodiment. The motivation is unchanged from Combination A, reinforced by the fact that the patentee itself identified '265 as the generic starting point and purported to improve only the analysis of the resulting partial images — a software/computational distinction that is not claimed in claim 1 at all.

Combination C (supplying the display-lens element): A/B in further view of a mobile-device head-mounted viewer

Element 5 — "at least one lens placed in front of the display relative to a user" — is the only limitation not squarely met by A or B. It is also the weakest limitation in the claim, for three independent reasons:

1. The patent concedes it is known. The specification states: "the player, in an inherently known manner, wears a display similar to eyeglasses in front of his eyes, and the virtual environment is represented on this display." An express applicant admission that the eyeglass-style viewer is an sich bekannt (inherently known) removes this element from the field of arguable novelty.
2. Ritchey already discloses the display hardware. He discloses HMD 145 with position sensing, head/eye tracking, and roll/pitch/yaw inputs ([0121], [0128]) and expressly contemplates the camera-plus-adapter being worn on a helmet with the imagery displayed to the wearer ([0124]).
3. Onyenobi discloses the phone-display half. He discloses the panoramic view "displayed in a comprehensible format for a user on the display of the mobile communication device," user-pannable and zoomable.

A POSITA combining A or B with an ordinary smartphone head-mounted-viewer arrangement (a lens or lens pair interposed between the phone display and the user's eye — the ubiquitous "phone-in-a-headset" configuration well known in the consumer AR/VR space years before 2014) arrives at claim 1 as a whole. Motivation: the patentee's own stated use case — moving through a space while a virtual environment is rendered on head-worn eyewear, with the phone serving simultaneously as the camera host, the processing unit, and the display. There is a strong, express KSR rationale for the combination: using the mobile device for a second, already-known function it is capable of performing (display + optics), which KSR treats as an obvious design choice.

Honesty flag. I did not retrieve and verify a specific pre-2014 patent or printed publication whose four corners disclose "a lens in front of a mobile-device display relative to the user." I am characterizing the class of art and citing the patent's own admission and Ritchey's HMD disclosure. Before this combination is reduced to an IPR petition, a targeted search of the 2010–2013 smartphone-HMD viewer art is required. I will not represent that I have a verified reference in hand.

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5. Dependent claims 2–11 — element-by-element

All are obvious as either (a) expressly disclosed in the same references, (b) predictable design variations under KSR, or (c) directly admitted.

Note on claims 9–10: the earlier sections flagged these two claims as structurally redundant (claim 10 appears to restate claim 9's distortion limitation). That redundancy does not help the patentee — redundant dependent claims add no independent validity weight and are trivially obvious over each other.

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6. Motivation to combine — consolidated KSR showing

The record supports at least five independent rationales, any one of which suffices:

1. Same field, same problem, express same solution. Ritchey states the patent's own asserted advantage (one camera cheaper and simpler than many) as his motivation in 2010. There is no unexpected result to weigh.
2. Complementary teachings fixing each other's stated defects. Breuninger's stated problem is beam-path obstruction and compactness; Ritchey's offset right-angle prisms are expressly disclosed as solving exactly the focusing/obstruction defect of 45° flat mirrors ([0055], [0059]). This is the classic "reference B cures the deficiency identified by reference A" rationale.
3. Simple substitution / design choice. Mirror vs. prism, two vs. three vs. four deflection elements, and equal-radius placement are all mechanical or packaging choices with predictable outcomes.
4. Porting a known technique to a known host device. Placing an optical attachment on the camera the consumer already owns is the express object of both Ritchey and Breuninger; extending that to the smartphone camera is the natural and predicted migration, as Onyenobi reflects.
5. Applicant admissions. The patent itself concedes (a) that the '265 arrangement is a generic multi-direction optical capture arrangement with first and second deflection elements, and (b) that the eyeglass-style display is "inherently known."

Teaching away — none found. No reference disparages plural deflection elements, a return-path fold, or an adapter mounted on a phone camera.

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7. Secondary considerations (objective indicia)

Expect nothing helpful to the patentee:

• No unexpected results. The asserted benefits in the specification (single camera, low cost, no shutter synchronization, reduced computational load) are precisely the benefits Ritchey already attributes to single-camera panoramic adapters.
• No long-felt need / failure of others nexus. The DE and EP siblings were allowed to lapse (established in the earlier sections) — inconsistent with a commercially valuable, unmet-need invention.
• No licensing or industry-acclaim record surfaced in any search performed for this analysis.
• Any praise or copying argument would fail for lack of a nexus between the asserted evidence and the claimed combination (which is tied to a phone-display-lens packaging, not to the optical idea the specification touts).

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8. Where the claim is most and least vulnerable

Most vulnerable elements (best § 103 targets):

1. The S/Z return-path splitter (limitation 3) — met by Breuninger's two-stage mirror fold.
2. The four-element count and circular arrangement (claims 2–4) — met almost verbatim by the admitted Carney '265 centro-symmetrical, four-sector geometry.
3. The holding fixture/attachment/receptacle (limitation 4) — met by Ritchey's housing/support/mount structure and Breuninger's mounted Aufsatz.

Least vulnerable (and the cleanest non-infringement hook): the "lens placed in front of the display relative to a user" of limitation 5. This is the element the earlier sections identified as a prosecution-driven narrowing and as the basis for a likely prosecution-history-estoppel argument. It is also the element with the weakest verified prior-art mapping in my current set. If you are (i) attacking validity, this is where the search must be strengthened; if you are (ii) defending an accused product, this is where a product that mounts optics only on the camera side of a device (and puts no lens in front of the display) escapes literal infringement.

Literal-scope trap for the patentee: because claim 1 says "a plurality" (not "at least three") while the abstract and specification tout three-or-more, the patentee is exposed to two-image prior art it evidently did not contemplate when drafting the claim. Breuninger alone is a two-image system. That drafting mismatch is a live § 103 exposure.

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9. Practical/procedural notes (brief; cross-referencing earlier sections)

• IPR-eligible. Every reference relied on above — US patents, US pre-grant publications, DE 202012008568 U1, FR 2150221 A1, FR 2982377 A1, WO 2014/017409 A1 — is a patent or printed publication, satisfying § 311(b). The grounds here are purely § 102/§ 103; no § 112 is needed (and none is available in an IPR).
• § 325(d) risk is real and should be managed. The examiner already considered Matsuki (US 2004/0264013), Ritchey (US 2010/0045773), Philippe (FR 2982377), Canon (US 2013/0127997), Ricoh (WO 2014/017409), Breuninger (DE 202012008568 U1), and Onyenobi (US 2015/0296139) — that is, essentially the entire cited-art set. A petition built primarily on those references invites discretionary denial under § 325(d). The two references that carry the most weight and the least § 325(d) exposure are US 3,055,265 and US 3,144,806, because they appear on the record as family cites (applicant admissions in the Background) rather than as examiner-cited art subject to a prior-art search of record. Building the primary ground on the patentee's own admissions, with Breuninger/Ritchey supplying the mobile-device packaging, is the cleaner path.
• The § 315(b) clock has not started — no complaint service was located (earlier sections), and a demand letter does not trigger it. But diarize complaint-service-plus-365-days as a hard date the moment a complaint appears.
• The maintenance-fee window (7.5-year fee, roughly due 2026-11-07 for this small entity) should be checked before funding any challenge; if the fee lapses, this analysis becomes moot.

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10. Confidence and limitations

• Claim text is taken from the Google Patents full text supplied for this analysis; I have not re-verified it against the USPTO PatentCenter facsimile.
• Quote-level citations to Breuninger, Ritchey, Onyenobi, and Carney '265 are drawn from the retrieved EPO/Google Patents publication texts. Where I cite paragraph numbers, they are the paragraph numbers in those published texts; a petition must verify each against the certified copy.
• Ritchey's status as § 102(a)(1) art rests on its 2010-02-25 publication date; Breuninger's on its 2012-09-25 DE publication. Both are comfortably before 2014-06-12.
• Onyenobi (US 2015/0296139) is relied on only as § 102(a)(2) art (filed 2014-04-11, before the 2014-06-12 effective filing date). Confirm its "effectively filed" status and inventorship before using it as the sole § 102 basis; for § 103 purposes it is usable regardless as evidence of the state of the art.
• The display-lens combination (Combination C) is the least empirically supported part of this analysis. I identified the class of art and the applicant admission, but I did not retrieve a specific verified pre-2014 smartphone-HMD viewer reference. Treat Combination C as a search directive, not a finished ground.
• Combination A is my strongest § 103 position, with Combination B as the § 325(d)-resilient alternative. Both are built from references the patentee either admitted ('265, '806) or that are cited on the face of the patent, so the art itself is unimpeachable — only the combination rationale is contestable, and the KSR record here is unusually favorable because Ritchey articulates the patent's own asserted advantage as his motivation.