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).
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.
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...
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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...
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)
From reamde, by Neal Stephenson, 2011.
I was kinda sad when I heard they replaced everything with Windows NT.
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.