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.
If you trust the guys involved (and I do because they have a great track record within the German hacking community) the story goes as follows: This invalidation was carried out by a jury who had no clue what they were doing, after the first judge (coincidentally married to a google lobbyist) pulled back frommthe case which was running rather well for them.
I just spent 3 hours on listening to a (German) podcast on the matter with one of the people who developed the algorithm that was copied (addressing scheme for storing and adressing the different LOD tiles in memory, coincidentally the exact scheme Google uses till today, because the guys spent a lot of time optimizing).
The prior art TerraVision had the same name but was a completely different software (military simulation if I understood correctly) and didn't make use of that algorithm.
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)
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.
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.