ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,315,070, issued on May 27, was assigned to NVIDIA Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Real-time caustics mapping" was invented by Yaobin Ouyang (Shanghai) and Nan Lin (Shanghai).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Apparatuses, systems, and techniques to ray trace caustics in a scene using feedback of photon information between frames. In at least one embodiment, photon tracing determines photon footprints in an individual frame as a result of individual photons interacting with one or more caustic-casting objects in that frame, and uses those photon footprints to facilitate photon tracing in subsequent frames."
The patent was filed on Jan. 23, 2023...