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
You might enjoy the "How Google Earth Really Works" article I linked from the article. It goes into how the multi-resolution texturing works and why it's unique.
I see the lineage from SGI's Clip-Map to Keyhole's Universal Texture to Carmack's "Mega Texture" to today's Unreal's Nanite for geometry.
(not claiming anyone infringed anyone's IP, just the natural evolution of a clever idea)
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."
Expanding on the subject of prior art for a navigable 3D globe: A family member used to work in the weather graphics department at a TV station in the late 90s or very early 2000s. During a tour I got to try something very similar to Google Earth that ran on IRIX (but without access to terrain imagery IIRC, just weather imagery) that they used for doing weather animations.
SGI had some cool hardware. This station also had an O2 and an Onyx, sharing an 18GB SCSI external drive over NFS, if I am remembering their explanation right (these memories are older than I was when I formed them). The software rep happened to be on site that day, and mentioned Inventor files, I think.
I was kinda sad when I heard they replaced everything with Windows NT.
Your memory is correct. This was the default setup for WSI’s TV weather system. Early systems used Indy/Indigo^2 boxes instead of the O2.
In later revisions, they had terrain mapping but it required 8 gigabytes of ram for the texture mapper, at a cost of $60,000.
That was all ripped out and replaced with Dell hardware running Red Hat in 2005. The trusty O2 ran crawls and alerts, spooled WSI’s AWIPS data feed into iNews (how TV news produces the show) for another decade. It could still be there, running.
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.