[rob74]

Well, the article (more or less) says that it ran on an SGI workstation (some photos are available here: https://artcom.de/en/?project=terravision), of course it would have been impossible in a 1990s browser. What I actually wanted to say was that, while the technical feat of programming something like this in the nineties is certainly something to be proud of, I still think that the basic idea of zooming in from orbit to a certain section of the globe is too obvious to be patentable - and from a purely mathematical point of view (ignoring things like levels of detail of 3D models, memory limitations, the actual 3D programming etc.) the signature zooming-in animation from Google Earth (which apparently was also present in Terravision) is not that complicated to implement either.