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Yay the US patent system...
Biggles
<font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
in Zocalo v2.0
[url]http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=52561[/url]
Comments
"A graphics display terminal performs a pan operation with respect to a view motion center to effectuate spherical panning, thereby providing perspective and non-perspective views. Three dimensional instructions stored in terminal memory are re-transformed in accordance with a panned direction. Also a zoom feature is provided so that displayed images may be magnified as desired."
However, the Graphics Display Terminal performs no operation or calculation pertaining to 3d effects. This is all done either in the GPU+CPU. A technicallity, but a very important one. The Graphics Display Terminal simply displays what it is told to. It doesn't do anything. And the patent clearly says "graphics display terminal performs a pan operation" so it clearly doesn't apply to current technology. It might apply to a pseudo-holo technology that isn't fully holographic...but as that is not software, the patent is non-technically-specific and thus not admissible.
Lastly, as is stated by someone on the board, the application doesn't do any processing - it is all in the GPU to make this effect. Again, hardware, not software. What might be admissible is to have gone after people that had software emmulators for 3d effects, but no one does that anymore!
Seriously guys, don't go by the comments in that Blues News thread. I held my nose and read all forty-one of them, but not one person there even knew what this patent is claiming to protect (well, one person was in the ballpark). This patent is claiming to have invented "Homeworld-style" viewing (a camera viewpoint that orbits the object being viewed, with the azimuth, elevation, and distance under direct control of the user). They did not patent "3D math" or any other such nonsense.
It could conceivably hold up in court, if it goes that far. Hard to say without a lot of expensive research. Invention date was apparently early to mid-eighties. This patent replaces a previous application made in 1984. There might be prior art, but not much. We'll have to wait and see.
[B]This patent is claiming to have invented "Homeworld-style" viewing (a camera viewpoint that orbits the object being viewed, with the azimuth, elevation, and distance under direct control of the user).[/B][/QUOTE]
That pretty much describes the camera system in every console RPG I've played (well, all the ones from the 3D age). It also describes an external camera in any game that uses one (mostly flight/space sims) and could conceivably stretch to any 3rd person game at all.