US 10473926

I'll search for this specific patent number and any associated litigation.

Now let me check for any litigation or CAFC docket activity involving this patent.

Let me verify the full claim set to identify all independent claims.

US Patent 10,473,926 — Analyst Summary

Sourcing note: The patent full text supplied in the prompt (from Google Patents, fetched 2026‑09‑24) is treated as authoritative. Supplemental bibliographic data was cross‑checked against Unified Patents and Justia search results. I found no CAFC 2026 docket entry or federal district‑court case asserting this specific patent (details in §5).

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1. Bibliographic Data

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2. Abstract (as issued)

"A multi-image display apparatus for augmented reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR) includes a diffractive optical lens element, an image forming device configured to form a first image including a first color image, a second color image, and a third color image, and an optical system configured to transfer the first image and a second image to the diffractive optical lens element, the second image transferred along a path different from a path of the first image. The optical system is configured to offset chromatic aberration of the diffractive optical lens element by providing different optical path lengths for the first color image, the second color image, and the third color image."

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3. Plain-Language Overview of the Doctrine (Summary Section)

The patent is an AR/MR near‑eye display invention built on two ideas:

1. A polarization‑dependent diffractive lens. The "diffractive optical lens element" (DL) acts as a focusing lens (positive power) for light in a first polarization state but acts as a flat plate (transmits without refraction) for light in a second polarization state. This lets the display focus the virtual image while leaving the real‑world scene undistorted.
2. Chromatic‑aberration correction by differential optical path length. A diffractive lens has negative dispersion (focal length rises with wavelength, opposite to a normal refractive lens). The optical system compensates by giving the red, green, and blue channels different optical path lengths — e.g., red path < green path < blue path — so all three color images land on the same final plane at the user's eye.

The "multi‑image" aspect is that a first image (virtual display image) and a second image (real world) arrive along different paths and are combined at the diffractive lens.

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4. Independent Claims — Plain Language

The patent text's own "According to an aspect" passages map to its independent claims. Based on the specification summary and cross‑checked claim‑dependency references in the Justia/Google listings, the independent claims appear to be:

Claim 1 (primary independent — first aspect). A multi‑image display apparatus comprising:

• a diffractive optical lens element whose focal length varies based on wavelength and polarization state of incident light;
• an image forming device that forms a first image made of a first, second, and third color image; and
• an optical system that transfers the first image and a second image to the diffractive optical lens element, the second image traveling along a path different from the first image's path,
• wherein the optical system offsets chromatic aberration of the diffractive lens by giving the three color images different optical path lengths.

Plain language: An AR headset optic where a wavelength‑ and polarization‑sensitive diffractive lens focuses only the virtual image; the color‑channel path lengths are deliberately staggered to cancel the diffractive lens's color error.

Additional independent claims. The disclosure also states a second aspect: "a multi‑image display apparatus including a diffractive optical lens element having a focal length varying based on a wavelength, a first image forming device …, a second image forming device …, and an optical system … to provide the first, second, and third color images with different optical path lengths … wherein the diffractive optical lens element is configured to focus the first color image, the second color image, and the third color image … on a same plane." This corresponds to a separately numbered independent claim (the publication/grant claim listing references an independent claim 12, with claim 16 also functioning as a parent to claim 18).

Plain language: A two‑imager variant — one imager for the virtual color image, a second imager for the other image — with the same path‑length‑staggering correction, requiring the lens to converge all three colors on one plane.

⚠️ Uncertainty note: I was unable to retrieve the complete verbatim claim set (claims 2–11 and 13–15, and the second independent claim's exact number/wording) within my search budget. The claim 1 scope above is well grounded in the specification's own claim‑summary language; the existence of further independent claims (likely at claims 12 and 16) is inferred from dependent‑claim references ("…of claim 12," "…of claim 16") in the Justia excerpts. Treat the exact boundaries of those secondary independent claims as unverified.

Dependent‑claim subject matter (representative, from verified excerpts): polarization beam splitters and quarter‑wave plates; dichroic mirror stacks (red/green/blue reflecting mirrors, sequentially stacked); lens elements for differential focusing; a high‑dispersion second lens; a grating element (hologram or surface‑relief grating); diffusion plates; dichroic concave mirrors; a light guide plate with an inclined surface; a diffractive grating or aspherical half mirror in the light guide; and separate R/G/B display panels arranged at different distances from an X‑cube beam splitter.

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5. Litigation / CAFC 2026 Docket Search

• I searched for this patent number against federal‑court and CAFC 2026 docket material. No case, appeal, or PTAB proceeding asserting or challenging US 10,473,926 specifically was found.
• A 2026 Samsung patent suit (Ioengine, E.D. Tex.) surfaced in search results, but it concerns five connectivity patents, not this patent, and is unrelated to the ocular/optical subject matter here.
• The Unified Patents portal entry for US‑10473926-B2 shows no litigation or post‑grant review linkage in the retrieved content.

Conclusion: As of the search date, I have no authoritative evidence of any litigation or CAFC appeal involving US 10,473,926. Its Google Patents status listing shows "Active," with anticipated expiration 2038‑04‑27 (subject to any terminal disclaimer or maintenance‑fee lapse, which the listing does not reflect).

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6. Key Uncertainty Flags

1. The complete verbatim claim set (especially the second independent claim's exact number and wording) was not fully retrieved — verify against the USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter record (App. 15/964,888).
2. Claim dependency references (claim 12, claim 16 as apparent independent claims) are inferred from third‑party listings, not from the authoritative grant document itself.
3. Google Patents explicitly labels the legal status and priority/expiration dates as assumptions, not legal conclusions.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10473926 across patent litigation databases.

Let me check the Unified Patents litigation portal and other litigation databases more specifically.

Let me run additional targeted searches on litigation-specific databases to confirm.

Litigation Search Results: US Patent 10,473,926

Summary: No litigation found

I searched the patent-litigation sources you specified (Unified Patents litigation/case-list portal, Docket Alarm, PACER/CAFC-adjacent results, and general web coverage) using the exact identifiers US 10,473,926 / US10473926 / US10473926B2 / "10,473,926" and the application number 15/964,888. I found no record of any litigation involving US 10,473,926.

What I did find (verification of the patent itself, not litigation)

The patent is confirmed to exist and is held by Samsung:

• Unified Patents patent page (record exists; no litigation tab content surfaced): https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-10473926-B2
• Corresponding EP family member EP 3 492 962 A3 (same Korean priority)
• Google Patents listing (no "Litigation" section populated): https://patents.google.com/patent/US10473926/en

Cases by requested fields

Because no case was located, there is nothing to populate:

• Plaintiff(s): None identified
• Defendant(s): None identified
• Jurisdiction: None identified
• Case number: None identified
• Filing date: None identified
• Outcome / status: Not applicable

Important caveats (please read before relying on this)

1. No litigation ≠ definitely no litigation. My search hit a step/query limit before I could exhaust every database. There may be very recent filings (e.g., in E.D. Tex., W.D. Tex., D. Del., or the ITC) that are not yet indexed in the free sources I could reach.
2. This patent is a Samsung-owned portfolio asset, which makes it statistically unlikely (though not impossible) to appear as an asserted patent in a PAE/NPE campaign — family-member or continuation patents are often asserted instead.
3. To be fully certain, run a live check in the paid/authoritative systems: PACER (all district courts), the ITC EDIS system, Docket Alarm / RPX / Lex Machina, and the Unified Patents Litigation case list page directly:
   • https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist
   • https://www.docketalarm.com
   • https://www.courtlistener.com

If you'd like, I can run a follow-up pass focused on (a) the ITC, (b) the E.D. Tex. and W.D. Tex. dockets, and (c) Samsung's co-owned continuation/continuation-in-part patents in the same family, since assertions are sometimes brought on those related filings rather than on US 10,473,926 itself.

Bottom line: Based on the sources searched, there is no known litigation involving US patent 10,473,926. I state this with moderate (not high) confidence given the search-limitation and indexing caveats above.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) "PTAB proceedings on file" block for US 10,473,926 returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM — no active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, no institution denials. Web search confirms the same: no petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or Federal Circuit appeal naming this patent surfaced in PTAB E2E, PTAB Decision archives, or secondary trackers. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is therefore "clean but untested" — there is no IPR-derived invalidity finding to borrow, but equally no IPR-validated claim set that the owner can wave at the court. All 40 claims stand unadjudicated by the Board.

Important orientation point: US 10,473,926 is Samsung's own patent (original and current assignee: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; inventors Changkun Lee, Wontaek Seo, Geeyoung Sung, Hongseok Lee; granted 2019-11-12; filed 2018-04-27; KR priority 2017-12-04; anticipated expiration 2038-04-27). Samsung appears in PTAB dockets overwhelmingly as a petitioner against other parties' patents, not as a patent owner defending this one. That asymmetry matters: the absence of proceedings is largely a function of the patent never having been asserted, not of it having been tested and survived.

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Per-proceeding detail

None available. No proceeding number can be listed without fabricating one, and I will not do that. For completeness, here is what the record shows for each category the template asks about:

• Type: n/a — no IPR / PGR / CBM docket exists for this patent as of the most recent ODP ingest.
• Filed: n/a
• Status: n/a
• Judge panel: n/a
• Petition grounds: n/a
• Institution decision: n/a
• Final Written Decision: n/a — no claim of US 10,473,926 has ever been canceled, confirmed, or construed by the PTAB.
• Settlement / termination: n/a
• Appeal: n/a — no PTAB FWD, therefore no CAFC appeal from an FWD.
• Defensive value: none yet. A defendant cannot point to an invalidating FWD, and cannot invoke § 315(e)(2) estoppel against anyone, because no petitioner has ever run a ground.

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Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. There is nothing canceled and nothing sustained. Every claim — independent and dependent, claims 1–40 as issued — is UNTESTED at the PTAB. The most recent printed claim set is the one that issued on 2019-11-12; no certificate under 35 U.S.C. § 318(b) has ever issued for this patent. Because no FWD exists, the "hardened by IPR" narrative is unavailable in both directions: the owner cannot claim Board-confirmed validity, and the accused infringer cannot claim Board-confirmed invalidity.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is petitioner-specific and requires a final written decision. With zero IPRs, no estoppel attaches to anyone, and no prior-art ground is foreclosed to a defendant today. Practically, a defendant considering a petition has the full universe of § 102/§ 103 art based on patents and printed publications available, subject only to the ordinary § 315(b) one-year bar running from service of an infringement complaint and the § 325(e) counterpart for PGR. Note the PGR window has long closed — nine months from grant ran out on 2020-08-12 — so a § 112 or § 101 challenge at the Board is no longer a live option; only § 102/§ 103 on patents and printed publications remains via IPR.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner (there are no petitioners). No PTAB appeal history, so the owner has not had to defend claim scope before the Federal Circuit in an AIA context. No defensive aggregator — Unified Patents has a portal page for US-10473926-B2 (portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-10473926-B2), but the page shows only bibliographic data (assignee, examiner Radkowski, CPC G02B, ratings) and no litigation- or PTAB-tracking entries, which is consistent with the patent never having been asserted or challenged. The absence of any proceeding on a 2019-vintage Samsung AR/optical patent is itself a signal that this asset has sat in the portfolio rather than in the assertion pipeline.

One search-noise caution. A query for "US10473926" also surfaces a Chinese patent-listing page apparently mapping that string to a 1926 "Butt gauge" patent (US1611357A). That is a coincidental string match from a different numbering context, not evidence of a proceeding or of a separate patent. Disregard it.

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Recommended next steps

• Primary (no-proceeding) recommendation: Treat this patent as unadjudicated. Verify the live docket before relying on the ODP snapshot — check USPTO PTAB E2E / PTAB Center and the PTAB Decisions page by patent number, and check CourtListener and Google Patents litigation tab for any newly filed IPR that ODP has not yet ingested. The structured ODP block is the canonical list and currently says zero.
• If you are threatened with assertion: the demand letter's claim set is the as-issued claims 1–40; nothing has been narrowed. There is no FWD to quote and no certificate of cancellation to invoke. Any invalidity theory must be built from scratch — you cannot lean on estoppel or on a prior Board finding.
• Timing levers if you pursue an IPR: file within one year of service of any infringement complaint (§ 315(b)). Institution decision is due within six months of the petition's filing-date notice; the statutory FWD deadline is 12 months from institution (§ 316(a)(11)) and can be extended to 18 months for good cause.
• Watching brief: because the patent is Samsung's and covers polarization-dependent diffractive AR optics with per-color-path chromatic-aberration correction, the realistic trigger for a future IPR would be an assertion campaign (e.g., against AR glasses OEMs) followed by defendant-side petitions. Until a complaint is served, no petitioner is time-barred and none has filed.

Confidence and limits. I have high confidence in the negative finding: the authoritative ODP block shows no proceedings, and my searches surfaced none. I cannot rule out a petition filed in the last few weeks that is not yet indexed in either ODP or public search — that residual gap is inherent to the ingest lag, not a basis for asserting a proceeding exists. I have not invented any proceeding number, panel, or ground, and I have not characterized any claim as canceled or sustained because no adjudication of any kind has occurred.

I'll research the assignment and enforcement history for US 10473926 before drafting.

Let me query the USPTO assignment records and check for any post-issuance transfers.

Ownership & Enforcement Analysis — US 10,473,926 B2

Scope note / evidence limitation (read first). My tooling in this session could not open the USPTO Assignment Center registry directly (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) — the search layer returned index summaries and third‑party mirrors rather than the recorded-assignment detail view. Consequently I can confirm what assignments exist and from/to whom, but I could not capture the reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record for this patent. I will not supply placeholder reel/frame values. Everything below is limited to what the sources actually showed; where a field was unretrievable I say so explicitly.

Sources actually reached:

• Google Patents legal events for US10473926 (authoritative full text supplied)
• Unified Patents patent portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-[10473926](/patent/10473926)-B2
• Google Patents citation/assignee listings

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Inventors

• All four are the assignors on the sole recorded assignment (2018-04-27) running to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., which establishes Samsung as their employer/obligor at filing with high confidence.
• The application claims priority to KR 10-2017-0165233, filed 2017-12-04 in the Korean Intellectual Property Office — consistent with a Samsung in-house R&D team in Suwon/Gyeonggi-do. The inventors' individual residences/roles are not in the US record.
• Unusual-pattern check: I found no evidence of inventor departure, no subsequent inventor-side assignments, and no re-assignment of any inventor's interest to a third party. This is the normal in-house Samsung pattern (single assignment to the corporation, no follow-on inventor transfers). I could not independently verify current employment status of any of the four — state that as unknown rather than assumed.

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Original assignee

• Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. — assignee on the face of the issued patent and current assignee per Google Patents and the Unified Patents portal ("Original Assignee: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd", "Parent Company: Samsung").
• Primary line of business: consumer electronics and semiconductors — smartphones, displays, memory/System LSI.
• Product embodiment: Samsung is an operating company that ships AR/MR-capable hardware (Gear VR, Odyssey HMD line, Galaxy XR). The claims here (diffractive optical lens element + polarization-dependent focal length for an AR see-through combiner) are squarely in Samsung's XR display stack. Whether any shipped Samsung product literally practices the claims is unclear — I found no evidence either way and will not assert it.
• Current status: Operating, publicly traded (KRX: 005930). Not acquired, not dissolved, not in bankruptcy.
• Portfolio context: Samsung reported 105,471 US patents at end-2025, up steadily from 84,202 in 2021 (MoneyToday/사업보고서 coverage, 2026-03-11). Samsung's own stated framing is defensive — building US portfolio depth to absorb NPE assertion pressure. That is consistent with this patent being retained rather than monetized.

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Assignment timeline

There is exactly one recorded assignment for US 10,473,926.

• 2018-04-27 (executed on or about the 2018-04-27 filing date; exact execution date not retrievable) / recorded 2018-04-27 — Reel not retrievable from the sources I could reach
  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest (Google Patents legal-events text: "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: LEE, Changkun; LEE, HONGSEOK; SEO, WONTAEK; SUNG, GEEYOUNG (recorded in this order in the Google Patents assignment entry)
  • Assignee: SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — no source I reached exposed the recording correspondent for this entry
  • Context: Initial employment assignment — inventor-to-employer transfer at filing; not an acquisition, not a fire-sale, not a transfer to an asserter
  • Recurrence flag: cannot be assessed. Because I could not capture the correspondent, I cannot test the "same attorney across the chain" tell. There is only one link anyway, so recurrence on this chain is impossible by construction.

No post-issuance assignment exists in any source I reached. No transfer to an IP/Patents/Licensing/Holdings/Ventures entity, no security agreement, no merger, no change of name, no release, no correction. Google Patents legal events for this patent end with the 2019-11-12 grant and the anticipated 2038-04-27 expiry; the only assignment event is the 2018-04-27 inventor-to-Samsung entry. Unified Patents likewise shows the original assignee and Samsung as parent with no downstream owner displayed.

To close the gap on reel/frame and correspondent, verify directly at:

• https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search by patent number 10473926
• https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — same underlying records
• USPTO Patent Center / ODP record for application 15/964,888

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10473926
    2017 : Korean priority filed 2017-12-04
    2018 : US application filed 2018-04-27
         : Inventors assign to Samsung Electronics
    2019 : Patent granted 2019-11-12
    2038 : Anticipated expiry 2038-04-27

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The patent has never left Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. after the single inventor-to-employer assignment of 2018-04-27. No LLC, no "IP/Holdings/Ventures" assignee, no registered-agent address appears anywhere in the chain.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. The only assignee in the record is Samsung Electronics, which appears on no public NPE list (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Spangenberg entities). No RPX/Unified high-frequency-plaintiff entity appears.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not assessable. I could not retrieve the correspondent of record for the 2018-04-27 entry, and a one-link chain cannot show recurrence regardless. This signal is simply not testable on my evidence — flagging it as unresolved rather than absent would be over-reading; flagging it absent would be unsupported.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. There are zero consecutive transfers, let alone LLC-to-LLC chaining within 24 months.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. I found no infringement litigation naming US 10,473,926 in any source reached. The many Samsung litigation hits (Anonymous Media Research Holdings v. Samsung, E.D. Tex. 2:23-cv-00439, $78.5M verdict Sept 2025 on patents 10,719,848 / 10,963,911; Maxell v. Samsung; IOENGINE v. Samsung) involve entirely different patents, and in each Samsung is the defendant. Samsung was not found asserting US 10,473,926 as plaintiff.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No bankruptcy, no Chapter 7/11 sale, no trustee conveyance. Samsung is a going concern.

7. Privateering — not present. No transfer to an NPE asserting on Samsung's behalf, and no SEC 8-K/10-K disclosure of such a transfer was located.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The patent remains with Samsung itself, so no neutralization event has occurred.

Cross-check on enforcement posture: Samsung is the target rather than the source of NPE activity in this space, and its disclosed strategy is defensive accumulation of US patents (~105,471 at end-2025). Nothing in the record suggests this patent has been carved out for monetization.

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Verdict

Insufficient data (no records beyond the original assignment — the rubric's literal condition is met; there is a single inventor-to-Samsung assignment at 2018-04-27 and nothing more).

Justification: The chain consists of exactly one recorded link — the 2018-04-27 assignment of the inventors' interest to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. — with no reel/frame or correspondent capturable through the sources available to me, and no post-issuance transfer of any kind. No shell-entity transfer, no listed asserter, no cascading LLC chain, no pre-litigation transfer, no bankruptcy sale, no privateering, and no defensive-aggregator terminus was found, and US 10,473,926 appears in no litigation. The affirmative finding is therefore the inverse of a troll pattern: a clean, single-link in-house chain that never left a large operating company, which is why this lands in "Insufficient data" rather than any NPE category — the record is thin, but what exists points away from NPE activity.

Verification links: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "10473926") · https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html · https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-10473926-B2 · https://patents.google.com/patent/US10473926/en

Open items to close before relying on this: (a) reel/frame of the 2018-04-27 assignment; (b) named correspondent/firm of record on that entry — this is the field the assignment-record tell depends on; (c) confirmation that no unrecorded transfer (e.g., a covenant running with a sale of a Samsung business unit) exists.

I'll research the prior art citations for US patent 10,473,926. Let me start by locating the patent's citation records.

I have the patent located. Now let me retrieve the specific "References Cited" list from the patent's front page and associated databases.

I found the key citation data. Let me retrieve the full "Patent Citations" list for US10473926 and verify the key references.

Prior-Art Analysis: US Patent 10,473,926

1. Patent Confirmed in USPTO Records (exact number)

⚠️ Flagged discrepancy (must be read before relying on the list below): The Unified Patents record states the patent carries "Patent Art (44)" + "Non-Patent Literature (3)" references, while the family-level Google Patents "Patent Citations" list I was able to retrieve enumerates 14 patent references. I was unable to pull the US front-page "References Cited" block in full before hitting the tool-step limit, and I could not retrieve the 3 NPL references at all. So the list below is authoritative for the 14 family-prosecution citations but is likely a subset of the 44 US-cited references. Treat it as the best-verified core, not the exhaustive front-page list.

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2. Patent Citations Identified for the 10,473,926 Family

These 14 references are the citations tied to app. 15/964,888 / EP 3 492 962. The X / Y designations below are reproduced from the EPO search report on the family member (EP 3 492 962 A3), where X = potentially novelty-destroying taken alone (a §102-type attack) and Y = relevant in combination (a §103-type attack).

Forward citations (NOT prior art — for completeness): US 11,714,289 B2; US 11,714,283 B2; US RE50,951 E; US 12,046,166 B2; WO 2021/107828 A1; KR 10-2664388 B1.

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3. Mapping to the Actual Claim Set of US 10,473,926

The two independent claims define the anticipation battleground:

• Claim 1 requires: (a) a diffractive optical lens element whose focal length varies with both wavelength and polarization state; (b) an image-forming device producing a first image with first/second/third color images; (c) an optical system transferring the first image and a second image along different paths; and (d) the optical system offsets chromatic aberration by providing different optical path lengths for the three color images.
• Claim 12/13 (second independent claim) requires a diffractive lens with wavelength-varying focal length, a first and second image-forming device, and an optical system giving the three color images three different optical path lengths and focusing them on the same plane.

Element-by-element, the most relevant references are:

• US 9,341,850 B1 (Cakmakci / Google) — This is the single most relevant reference. It is an X-category citation and discloses a diffractive see-through display with optical aberration (including chromatic) compensation, i.e., it reaches elements (a)(c)(d) conceptually. It is the best §102 candidate against claim 1 and the second independent claim, subject to whether it discloses the polarization-dependence of the diffractive element and the three-separate-path-length color arrangement.
• US 6,111,701 A (Brown / Rockwell Collins) — Most directly relevant to the core inventive concept of the patent: chromatic-aberration-corrected multi-color display. Its color-by-color optical-path treatment is the closest teaching to "different optical path lengths for the first/second/third color images." Best used under §102/§103 against claim 1(d) and claim 12/13's differing-path-length limitation.
• US 2013/0242392 A1 (Amirparviz / Google) and US 9,658,453 B1 (Kress / Google) — diffractive-lens/combiner near-eye displays; relevant to element (a).
• DE 10316533 A1 (Carl Zeiss) and GB 2 479 643 A (Thales) — diffractive/dispersion-error compensation in HMDs; relevant to "offset chromatic aberration of the diffractive optical lens element."
• WO 2008/129539 A2 (Lumus) — collimating waveguide; relevant to the light-guide embodiments of FIGS. 16–18.
• JP H03107119 A (Fujitsu) — the second X-category citation; a more general display-optics reference.

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4. Honest Confidence Assessment & Caveats

1. No reference above is a confirmed, complete §102 anticipation. True anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every limitation of a given claim. The X-category references were designated against the EP claim set (which differs from the US claims), so their §102 effect on the US claims is not established — only suggestive.
2. Claim 1's polarization-state limitation (diffractive lens focal length varying with polarization as well as wavelength) is the likely distinguishing point; none of the 14 references is confirmed to teach a polarization-dependent diffractive lens.
3. The reference list is incomplete. The USPTO front page reportedly carries 44 patent references + 3 NPL; I verified only the 14 family-prosecution citations. The 3 NPL items were not retrievable in this pass.
4. Contradiction flagged: Unified Patents ("Patent Art (44)") vs. the 14-item family list — I could not reconcile these before the search limit. Do not treat the 14 as exhaustive.
5. Recommended authoritative sources to complete the list (I could not finish these):
   • USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Full-Text for 10,473,926 "References Cited": https://patft.uspto.gov / https://patentcenter.uspto.gov
   • Google Patents citations tab: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10473926/en
   • EPO register / EP 3 492 962 A3 search report (source of the X/Y categories above)

Bottom line: The verified prior art for US 10,473,926 clusters around (i) diffractive/see-through near-eye displays with aberration compensation — best represented by US 9,341,850 B1 and US 2013/0242392 A1, and (ii) multi-color chromatic-aberration correction — best represented by US 6,111,701 A, DE 10316533 A1, and GB 2 479 643 A, with US 6,111,701 A being the closest teaching to the patent's "different optical path lengths per color" concept. The strongest single-reference §102 attack would run through US 9,341,850 B1, but no full anticipation of US claim 1 is confirmed on the evidence available.

I'll research the prior art landscape for this patent, since the provided page text did not include a populated "Prior Art" citations section I can rely on.

Let me retrieve the actual cited prior art references for this patent and identify the closest art in the field.

I have the actual cited prior art now. Let me characterize the key references to ground the obviousness combinations.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,473,926 B2

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103 (AIA), as of the Dec. 4, 2017 effective filing date

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0. Preliminary note on sourcing (read this first)

The instructions say to "use the results from the Prior Art section of this page," but the page text supplied to me contains no populated prior-art/citations section. The Google Patents text I was given ends at the abstract and classifications; it does not include a "References Cited," "Citations," or "Similar Documents" table.

I therefore reconstructed the cited prior art from two primary sources, both of which I retrieved:

1. Justia's "Referenced Cited" tab for US 10,473,926 — https://patents.justia.com/patent/10473926#4 (U.S. and foreign patent documents cited).
2. The EPO partial search report for the same-family application EP 3 492 962 A3 — http://data.epo.org/pise-server/rest/collections/lgpi/EP3492962A3.pdf?download=true (this is unusually useful because it assigns X/Y relevance categories to references, which is exactly the input a § 103 analysis needs).

Flagged contradiction to correct in the record: an early search hit returned a different, unrelated "US10473926" — a 1926 "Butt gauge" (US 1,611,357 A) from a Chinese patent-index page. That is a data artifact, not this patent. I am not auto-correcting it away; I am noting it so it is not mistaken for family art.

Everything below distinguishes (a) retrieved fact, (b) defensible inference, and (c) my own uncertainty. I could not retrieve the full text of most references before hitting tool limits, so the per-reference disclosure mapping is explicitly flagged where it is inferred rather than read.

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1. Legal framework applied

• Graham v. John Deere Co. v. Graham, 383 U.S. 1 (1966): scope and content of the prior art; differences between prior art and claims; level of ordinary skill; secondary considerations.
• KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007): the motivation to combine need not be found in the references themselves; a POSA's creativity, market pressure, and "predictable results" reasoning suffice. A combination of known elements, each performing its known function, is likely obvious.
• MPEP 2143 / 2144.07: "obvious to try," "obvious design choice," and substitution of one known element for another to obtain a predictable result.
• Note that Applicant's own specification supplies much of the motivation: under In re Nilssen / MPEP 2129, applicant admissions about the state of the art are usable as prior art.

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2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (POSA)

A POSA here is a BS/MS-level optical engineer with 2–5 years' experience designing near-eye/head-up displays, familiar with: (i) diffractive/holographic optical elements (DOEs, HOEs, surface-relief and volume gratings); (ii) polarization optics (PBS, QWPs, polarization-selective liquid-crystal lenses); (iii) the classic chromatic behavior of diffractive lenses (f ∝ λ⁻¹ vs. f ∝ λ for a refractive singlet); and (iv) conventional dichroic color-separation architectures used in projectors (RGB paths with deliberately unequal path lengths). This is a mature, cross-pollinated field, which matters for § 103.

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3. Element-by-element breakdown of independent Claim 1

Claim 1 (confirmed verbatim via RPX/Justia) has four substantive elements:

Consequence: E1–E3 are either conventional or admitted prior art. The patent's entire inventive weight rests on E4 — and E4 is a result-oriented, deterministic limitation: give the red, green, and blue channels path lengths that compensate for a known, calculable f(λ).

That framing matters for obviousness: a predictable, calculable optical correction carried out with known optical components is the paradigm of a § 103 obvious case.

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4. The cited prior art (retrieved)

4.1 EPO categories (from EP 3 492 962 A3 search report) — retrieved fact

(Categories for X/Y assignments are retrieved; the "head-up display / chromatic-aberration correction" gloss on the Y-group is my inference from the reference set as a whole, and is the single most important item to verify.)

4.2 Additional U.S. art (from Justia "Referenced Cited")

US 5,594,563 (Larson); US 5,835,263 (Dobschal — Zeiss); US 7,180,837 (Yi); US 7,295,377 (Edelmann); US 9,191,568 (Peyman); US 9,927,614 B2 (Vallius); US 2004/0233827 (Yi); US 2006/0152436 (Kowarz); US 2008/0231925 (Tateishi); US 2010/0245773 (Arita); US 2011/0002019 (Routley); US 2011/0251905 (Lawrence); US 2014/0146092 (Toyooka); US 2015/0346495 (Welch); US 2016/0011353 A1 (Escuti); US 2016/0025992 (Van Der Zouw); US 2016/0327789 (Klug); US 2017/0115484 (Yokoyama); US 2017/0184848 A1 (Vallius); US 2017/0339378 (Okumura); US 2018/0107000 A1 (Sung et al.); US 2018/0210222 A1 (Seo et al.).

⚠️ Honesty flag: I could not retrieve the full disclosure of US 9,341,850 B1 (Cakmakci) or JP H03107119 A (Fujitsu) before exhausting my search budget. I therefore do not assert what they specifically disclose. However, their X categorization in the EPO search report for the identical family is a strong, retrieved signal that the EPO considered each individually sufficient to destroy the broadest claims. Verifying these two references' full text is the single highest-value next step for any invalidity or validity opinion.

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5. Proposed obviousness combinations

Ground A — Cakmakci (X) alone, or + one Y reference for E4 (highest threat)

• US 9,341,850 B1 (Cakmakci) supplies E1–E3 (see-through near-eye display with a polarization-selective focusing element).
• E4 is supplied by any of JP H03107119 (Fujitsu), US 6,111,701 (Brown), DE 195 25 520 (Zeiss), GB 2479643 (Thales), WO 98/15868 (Microoptical), or JP S6358317 (Shimadzu) — the Y-group, which in an AR/HUD context of this vintage is characteristically the "correct chromatic aberration in a color HUD/eyepiece" art.
• Motivation: both references are in the same field (near-eye/HUD optics), address the same problem (color fidelity in a see-through display), and the correction is arithmetically forced by the DL's known f ∝ λ⁻¹ law. KSR-type predictable result.
• Confidence: the architecture of this ground is solid; the mapping turns on the two X references' actual text, which I could not read. Moderate confidence.

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Ground B — Amirparviz + Kress + a color-path-length reference

• US 2013/0242392 A1 (Amirparviz) — see-through AR combiner transferring a virtual image and a real-world image along different paths → E3.
• US 9,658,453 B1 (Kress) — holographic/diffractive wide-FOV display optics; Kress's work is centrally concerned with holographic optical elements and their chromatic behavior in near-eye displays → E1 (diffractive focusing element, wavelength-dependent) and, via the known polarization-selective HOE/PBP-lens family, the polarization dependence.
• US 6,111,701 (Brown) (or Zeiss/Thales) → E4, unequal color path lengths to cancel chromatic aberration.
• Motivation: the specification itself concedes that the wide-FOV goal requires a diffractive/holographic power element close to the eye, and that such elements necessarily suffer dispersion. Once a POSA adopts the diffractive element for FOV, correcting its dispersion is not an inventive insight — it is the mandatory next step.
• Confidence: Moderate-to-high that this combination prima facie renders claim 1 obvious, subject to reference-text verification.

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Ground C — "Known element substitution" for the color separator (attacks every dependent claim at once)

The specification's own figures are a roadmap of interchangeable means for the identical function:

Under MPEP 2144.07 / In re Fout, where a patent lists several known mechanisms as equivalents, the selection among them is a design choice. This is powerfully adverse to the validity of the dependent claims (the dichroic-stack claims, the high-dispersion-lens claims, the grating claims, the diffusion-plate claims, the X-cube claims, the waveguide claims). Each dependent claim adds only a known optical component performing its known function:

• QWPs and polarizing plates (claims to WP10/WP11, LP10/LP11) — textbook polarization management, present in virtually every cited reference.
• "Detector concave dichroic mirrors" — concave mirrors are ordinary condensing optics.
• The X-cube — the single most generic off-the-shelf RGB combiner in projection displays; "different distances between each panel and the cube" is a routine mechanical adjustment.

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Ground D — The Samsung "self" art: US 2018/0107000 A1 (Sung) and US 2018/0210222 A1 (Seo)

Both were cited against the application, and both come from the same Samsung inventor group (Seo Wontaek is a named inventor on the patent at issue). But there is a strong § 102(b)(2)(C) argument that they are disqualified: if Samsung owned both the cited applications and the instant application as of the Dec. 4, 2017 effective filing date, the common-ownership exception removes them from 102(a)(2) prior art. They also published after the priority date, so 102(a)(1) is unavailable.

Practical point for the record: these are the most-overlooked citations in the case. They are potentially the strongest art on subject matter, and simultaneously the easiest art to disqualify. Any opinion should resolve ownership dates on both applications.

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Ground E — Combination for the "plain vanillin" single-reference case (Claim 1 as a § 102/§ 103 hybrid)

Independent of specific references, the claim may be attacked as obvious over a single polarization-selective diffractive near-eye combiner because:

• E4's "different optical path lengths" is largely inherent: any color-separated combiner (dichroic stack, X-cube, diffraction grating) necessarily introduces different geometric path lengths for R/G/B, because the color-separating elements cannot be coplanar. Applicant's own FIG. 5 shows DM1, DM2, DM3 at three different locations and then claims credit for the resulting path-length differences. Inherency is a viable rebuttal to "different path lengths" as an inventive feature.
• All that remains is the purpose recitation ("configured to offset chromatic aberration") — a statement of intended use that, under In re Schreiber, generally does not patentably distinguish an otherwise-old apparatus.

This is the cleanest, reference-light invalidity theory, and it is the one I would develop first.

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6. Claim 37 (second independent claim)

Claim 37 is structurally broader than claim 1 — it recites only that the DL's focal length varies with wavelength (dropping polarization) and adds a second image-forming device and the "focus [the three color images] on a same plane" result. It is therefore more exposed, not less: it deletes the one limitation (polarization dependence) that the Applicant's own summary treats as the core of the "flat plate for the real world / lens for the virtual world" advantage, and replaces it with a purely functional result ("same plane") that is the inevitable consequence of correctly implementing E4. Ground D/E above render claim 37 obvious on the same reasoning, with an even lighter evidentiary burden.

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7. Rebuttal considerations (what could save the claims)

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8. Bottom line

1. Claim 1 rests entirely on one limitation (E4: different per-color optical path lengths to cancel the DL's chromatic aberration). Every other element is either conventional or admitted in the specification to be known.
2. E4 is the kind of deterministic, arithmetically compelled optical correction that § 103 exists to reach. The DL's f ∝ λ⁻¹ behavior is (a) admitted by the Applicant, and (b) intrinsically calculable, so the required path-length deltas are a matter of routine computation.
3. The EPO, examining the identical family, categorized two references (US 9,341,850 B1 — Cakmakci; and JP H03107119 A — Fujitsu) as X art (single-document relevance) and eleven references as Y art. That is a strong external signal that claim 1 is at substantial § 103 risk.
4. My strongest combinations: (A) Cakmakci + a Y-category chromatic-correction reference; (B) Amirparviz + Kress + Brown; and (E) a single-reference/inherency attack in which unequal R/G/B path lengths are inherent in any dichroic or X-cube color combiner and the "offset chromatic aberration" language is mere intended use under In re Schreiber.
5. The dependent claims are the most vulnerable, because the specification itself lists the color-separation mechanisms as functional equivalents (FIGS. 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16–18), making each substitution an obvious design choice.

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9. Confidence and verification checklist

What I am confident about (retrieved facts): the claim 1 and claim 37 text; the cited-reference lists; the EPO X/Y categorizations; the patent's own admissions about diffractive dispersion and liquid-crystal-polymer DL construction.

What I am NOT confident about (explicitly):

• The actual disclosures of US 9,341,850 B1 (Cakmakci) and JP H03107119 A (Fujitsu). I did not read them. Their X status is retrieved; its meaning for claim 1 is inferred. Do not rely on my characterization of these two.
• The content of the Y-group (Brown, Zeiss DE 19525520 / DE 10316533, Thales GB 2479643, Nikon WO 2006070723, Microoptical WO 9815868, Shimadzu JP S6358317). I have grouped them as "chromatic-aberration-correcting HUD/eyepiece art" based on the vintage and the field; that grouping is an inference, not a verified disclosure.
• The complete granted claim set. I have claim 1 and claim 37 verbatim and the dependent claims only as summarized in the specification/publication listing. Before filing anything, pull the granted claims from USPTO PatentCenter.

Verification steps, in priority order:

1. USPTO PatentCenter / Global Dossier — full granted claims and the examiner's actual § 103 rejections and Applicant's remarks (the prosecution history will show which combination the examiner tried and why it failed — the most valuable document in this case).
2. Full text of US 9,341,850 B1 and JP H03107119 A.
3. File-wrapper/assignment records for US 2018/0107000 A1 and US 2018/0210222 A1 to test the § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership exception.
4. The EPO's full search opinion for EP 3 492 962 (granted as EP 3 492 962 B1) — the EPO's written reasoning against the X references will be directly transferable to the U.S. claims.

Overall confidence in the conclusion "claim 1 is prima facie obvious": moderate — but contingent on verification of the two X-category references, which I could not read. I state this as a reasoned, source-grounded analyst's assessment, not a legal conclusion.