avibarzeev

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)

I think it's great to give credit to ART+COM for making the demo they did at the time they did it.

Building a PC app that does it much better is also worth recognition IMO, and the Netflix show denies that.

The IP issues were resolved, but I think it was important to point out why there was no infringement for people who might not understand the details as well.

ART+COM's patent was invalidated in 2017 due to prior art from another app called TerraVision from SRI shown in 1994.

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.

It's a highly one-sided version from people who rightly IMO lost their case and had their patent invalidated.

The show left out Keyhole, which actually wrote Google Earth before Google bought them. It was written 100% from scratch and based on different and better technology.

https://avibarzeev.medium.com/was-google-earth-stolen-7d1b82...

Yeah, I was trying to keep it simple, but you convinced me to edit that line out for correctness. Thanks!

Their patent was invalidated in 2017. Here's why:

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/10/25/cafc-affirms-invalidit...

Here's a free link if you need it

https://avibarzeev.medium.com/was-google-earth-stolen-7d1b82...