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by w0mbat 1710 days ago
There were a lot of 3D globe products being created in the 90s.

I was one of the creators of Electronic Arts 3D Atlas which shipped in spring 1994. It sold two million copies on Mac and won many awards.

EA was the publisher but we developed it in London working at a BBC spinoff called MMC and getting the planetary data from UCL. This UCL unit eventually spawned Planetary Visions, a startup we worked with to supply data.

That wasn't even our first 3D zooming spinning satellite globe product. We did a huge touchscreen installation for the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle museum in Bonn, Germany. It was called "Erd Sicht" (Earth View), and in the early 90s had amazing satellite Earth graphics and animations.
2 comments
w0mbat 1710 days ago
Other products I can think of in that early 90s period included "Small Blue Planet" from Now What Software and "Virtual Museum", a tech demo CD-ROM from Apple that included a real-time rendered globe.
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atoav 1710 days ago
Yes, but they they did all use different indexing schemes than the patented one for Terravision.
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avibarzeev 1709 days ago
ART+COM's patent was invalidated in 2017 due to prior art from another app called TerraVision from SRI shown in 1994.
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atoav 1709 days ago
If you trust the guys involved (and I do because they have a great track record within the German hacking community) the story goes as follows: This invalidation was carried out by a jury who had no clue what they were doing, after the first judge (coincidentally married to a google lobbyist) pulled back frommthe case which was running rather well for them.

I just spent 3 hours on listening to a (German) podcast on the matter with one of the people who developed the algorithm that was copied (addressing scheme for storing and adressing the different LOD tiles in memory, coincidentally the exact scheme Google uses till today, because the guys spent a lot of time optimizing).

The prior art TerraVision had the same name but was a completely different software (military simulation if I understood correctly) and didn't make use of that algorithm.

They still convinced the jury : )

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mgliwka 1709 days ago
The referenced podcast episode:

https://cre.fm/cre222-terravision

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atoav 1707 days ago
A thanks for adding that, I somehow forgot to add it myself.
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