ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,386,806, issued on Aug. 12, was assigned to Imagination Technologies Ltd. (Kings Langley, Great Britain).
"Hierarchy merging in computer graphics" was invented by Matthew Harrison (Kings Langley, Great Britain), John W. Howson (Kings Langley, Great Britain), Luke T. Peterson (San Francisco) and Steven J. Clohset (San Francisco).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A hierarchy is a multi-level linked structure of nodes, wherein the hierarchy represents data relating to a set of one or more items to be processed. Where there are multiple input hierarchies, it may improve the efficiency of the processing of the items to merge the input hierarchies...