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by BrianMcCl 1708 days ago
Well I found in internet archive an older version of the same document in PS format that was captured at May 16, 1997 : https://web.archive.org/web/19970516152226/http://www.ai.sri...

This PS still contains same dates. On footer dates January 26, 1995 while the first page says April 22, 1994.

I also found the old SRI TerraVision homepage captured at May 16, 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970516142933/http://www.ai.sri...

As well as the old datacenter page referring to SRI Terravision captured at June 5, 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970605180747/http://www-itg.lb...

And here is the newer homepage of the later program version SRI TerraVision II captured at December 02, 2000 still containing some short promo videos of the software: https://web.archive.org/web/20001202100300/http://www.tvgeo....

I need to check this site more deep but on first impression the SRI TerraVision I in 1997 and SRI TerraVision II in 2000 as shown in the linked videos are kind of inferior in sense of performance and capability compared to Art+Com TerraVision in 1994. Especially the videos from 1997(running on SGI) looked really bad and more like an early prototype. Just the 2000(on PC) videos SGI TV looked a bit better. All the TerraVisions programs may share the same name for whatever reason(?), but I would assume they do not use the same Algorithms. If Keyhole/Google "borrowed" ideas for Google Earth I would guess they did not copy them from SRI TerraVision, but from Art+Com TerraVision. But how knows?

If Brian from SGI was the connection to Keyhole/Google he could be also the connection to the MAGIC project from SRI since they use the same SGI Onyx at the beginning as Art+Com.