Walk the independent claim. Micron's grant US11373375B2, "Augmented reality product display" (issued June 28, 2022; inventors including Radhika Viswanathan), is a granted patent — but notice the CPC. The anchor is G06T 19/006 (AR rendering) with G06Q commerce classes, not the G02B optics classes that dominate headset patents.
The element that does the work is in software and commerce, not glass. Where Magic Leap and Lumus claim how to get light to the eye, this claim is about what the AR system shows and how it ties to a product — rendering product information as an overlay and connecting it to a purchase flow. It is an application-layer AR patent.
What it reads on is an AR shopping or product-information experience — the kind where a phone or headset overlays details, pricing, or purchase options onto a real-world product. That this comes from a memory maker like Micron is itself notable; it signals a component company reaching into the AR application layer.
The distinction the desk insists on is the CPC layer. Lumping all "AR patents" together hides that the category splits into at least two very different arts: the optics (G02B) and the rendering/application layer (G06T, G06Q). A claim in one layer says little about freedom to operate in the other, and conflating them is a common analytical error.
Scope discipline: the claim protects the recited AR product-display method, not AR commerce in general and not headset optics at all. A different commerce-overlay implementation, or any optics design, operates outside it. The defensible element is the specific rendering-and-commerce method recited.
For a strategist, the lesson is layer-awareness. The AR patent map is stratified — optics at the bottom, rendering and application on top — and a complete freedom-to-operate read has to check both. Micron's 2022 grant marks a pin in the upper layer, well away from the optics cluster where most of the attention goes.