ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,254,747, issued on March 18, was assigned to IGT (Las Vegas).
"Expanding and contracting reels" was invented by Yu Chong (Reno, Nev.), Nick Hillstrom (Reno, Nev.), Nathan Ajhar (Sparks, Nev.) and Chris Peterson (Reno, Nev.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Systems and methods which employ one or more reels that expand contract responsive to the occurrence of (or lack thereof) different events."
The patent was filed on June 17, 2022, under Application No. 17/843,346.
*For further information, including images, charts and tables, please visit: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearc...