All with no mention at all of Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash, which included a quite detailed equivalent of Google Earth (called 'Earth', iirc).
I've previously written about Snow Crash and Earth. Kind of tired given all the Metaverse hype this year. FYI, there were other inspirations like the amazing "Powers of 10" movie too.
But I didn't think it was relevant to the patent case or the Netflix show, which hinged on whether two SGI execs copied anyone's code. They didn't. More relevant were actual systems like SRI's TerraView that were prior art in a legal sense.
art+com Terravison had support for arbitrary CAD models,
SRI Terravision was a pure terrain plus imagery viewer[1] as far I can tell.
configurations of roads, rivers or frontiers, satellite images, actual temperatures, historical views, CAD-models, actual camera shots, are called up, stored or generated in a spatially distributed fashion. [2] were all not in SRI but in Keyhole EarthViewer/ Google Earth and not covered by prior art.
That should be distinct enough in usual patent cases where any minute modification of a car engine is patentable.
Is that mentioned lecture video of Stephen Lau, which I'm sad to learn, was one of the early COVID-19 victim[3], somewhere publicly available?
Some Excursion: even 10 years later, the most relevant IP to current mesh based / photogrammetric modeled virtual globes in my opinion:
The Rapid 3D Mapping pipeline developed by the swedish miltary devision of Saab, spun off as C3, that got acquired by Apple in October 2011.
The completeness and vastness of surface features was quite the step up from the draped texture on 2.5D terrain plus some random models.
For those who don't remember. The Google Earth/Apple Maps of today is quite a different beast to anything before April 2011, first available in Nokia ovi Maps 3d
Interestingly, Snow Crash is mentioned in the first episode, where the two meet(the coder and the visionary), where they talk about which books they've read, and can't believe they have the same tastes.
"The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what
you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no
guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel."
avibarzeev|4 years ago
But I didn't think it was relevant to the patent case or the Netflix show, which hinged on whether two SGI execs copied anyone's code. They didn't. More relevant were actual systems like SRI's TerraView that were prior art in a legal sense.
mxfh|4 years ago
configurations of roads, rivers or frontiers, satellite images, actual temperatures, historical views, CAD-models, actual camera shots, are called up, stored or generated in a spatially distributed fashion. [2] were all not in SRI but in Keyhole EarthViewer/ Google Earth and not covered by prior art.
That should be distinct enough in usual patent cases where any minute modification of a car engine is patentable.
Is that mentioned lecture video of Stephen Lau, which I'm sad to learn, was one of the early COVID-19 victim[3], somewhere publicly available?
[1] https://www.sri.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/778.pdf
[2] https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=RE44...
[3] https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/pelham-al/stephen...
---
Some Excursion: even 10 years later, the most relevant IP to current mesh based / photogrammetric modeled virtual globes in my opinion:
The Rapid 3D Mapping pipeline developed by the swedish miltary devision of Saab, spun off as C3, that got acquired by Apple in October 2011.
The completeness and vastness of surface features was quite the step up from the draped texture on 2.5D terrain plus some random models.
For those who don't remember. The Google Earth/Apple Maps of today is quite a different beast to anything before April 2011, first available in Nokia ovi Maps 3d
https://freegeographytools.com/2011/nokia-ovi-maps-in-3d
https://www.slashgear.com/apple-acquires-c3-technologies-for...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_3D_Mapping
LargoLasskhyfv|4 years ago
MobiusHorizons|4 years ago
CompuHacker|4 years ago
From reamde, by Neal Stephenson, 2011.