Appeal No. 2000-1965
Application 09/149,616
except for the claim that the whole room is substantially black.
Further, we think it was well known at the time of the invention
for haunted house attractions to have enclosed rooms with
non-reflective black walls, ceilings, and floors using
fluorescent patterns with blacklight illumination, so that the
claim covers viewing known haunted house attractions with the
Steenblik lenses. Nevertheless, in the absence of evidence of
such use of black backgrounds, we conclude that Burke's teaching
of using a black background to isolate the subject reasonably
would have suggested using a black background for the fluorescent
patterns in Ishii for the same reason. The subject in Burke is
viewed, it is just viewed by film rather than a user, but the
principle of having the subject stand out against a background is
the same; note that the examiner does not rely on the final
three-dimensional projection of the filmed image. Moreover, it
appears that the reason Ishii uses a reflective dark background
to achieve uniform illumination of the tubular passage is to
overcome the safety problem in the prior art of riders in a
completely dark tube possibly getting neck injuries due to
accidental variable shock if the tube changes suddenly in
direction (col. 1, lines 32-47; col. 2, line 9). Thus, Ishii
suggests to one of ordinary skill that the background purposely
was not completely black to avoid this safety problem, which
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