{"id":8248,"date":"2020-09-08T09:31:23","date_gmt":"2020-09-08T15:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8248"},"modified":"2020-09-08T10:15:51","modified_gmt":"2020-09-08T16:15:51","slug":"tech-marketing-and-patent-rhetoric-360-panorama-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8248","title":{"rendered":"Tech Marketing (and patent) rhetoric: 360 Panorama edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marketing rhetoric is evergreen. Yet, our collective memory is often short. Redfin’s curious claim to have invented real estate web mapping in 2005<\/a> is but one example. <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Memento Park – Budapest seems appropriate. <\/em><\/p>\n

360 Rumors published this on Friday, 4 September from Matterport<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“They were the first to offer 3D virtual tours where users could not only look around in 360 but could move within the space through a flying 3D transition that has become known as the \u201cMatterport effect.\u201d Matterport virtually tours are also equally famous for their 3D dollhouse view.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

. Transitions between scenes have been around since the late 1990’s. <\/p>\n

A bit of personal history:<\/p>\n

I began creating 360 panoramic scenes with the introduction of Quicktime VR in 1995. I flew to California to take an Apple class. (The Santa Cruz based instructor sported the requisite pony tail.) <\/p>\n

The required skills included: <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Camera\/Lens\/tripod ability – “keep it flat!”\n
  2. A Mac laptop\n
  3. The ability to use something called MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop<\/a>)\n
  4. Comfort with Quicktime\n
  5. Hotspots, used to jump from scene to scene\n
  6. The ability to deploy completed scenes locally and on the rather new internet\n
  7. Hypercard<\/a> for scripting and scene effects<\/ol>\n

    I, and many others around the world created millions of Quicktime VR single and multi-node<\/a> scenes. John and Janet Stathas along with Nancy and I launched Virtual Properties that same year. <\/p>\n

    A software, hardware and services “ecosystem” began to emerge with first and third party products, including Quicktime 3 (1998)<\/a>, notably<\/p>\n

    One thing this means is that you can use filters and transitions anywhere you might use a decompressor, not only in connection with QuickTime movies. You can just as easily apply a transition between two arbitrary images (perhaps contained in two offscreen graphics worlds). I’ve seen this capability used to add QuickTime video effects as transitions between QuickTime VR nodes<\/strong>. The default behavior of QuickTime VR is simply to jump from one node to the target node. It’s much nicer to render some video effect, say a nice smooth dissolve, when moving from node to node. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Kaidan<\/a>, a now defunct hardware firm (great people) and an association initially called iqtvra – now IVRPA<\/a> also quickly come to mind. <\/p>\n

    The first large scale IP (intellectual property) battle that I know of occurred between iPIX and Helmut Dersch<\/a> over Panorama Tools<\/a>. Wikipedia<\/a> on Oak Ridge, TN based iPix. <\/p>\n

    Matterport (founded in 2011 and has raised $114M<\/a>) appears to have a number of patents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Gary Reback’s 2002 article Patently Absurd<\/a> is a must read for entrepreneurs, investors and citizens:<\/p>\n

    There are those who view the patent system as the seedbed of capitalism–the place where ideas and new technologies are nurtured. This is a romantic myth. In reality, patents are enormously powerful competitive weapons that are proliferating dangerously, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has all the trappings of a revenue-driven, institutionalized arms merchant.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    I would be remiss to not mention Bamboo, another VC backed 360 panorama provider that emerged during the late 1990s’. Bamboo famously hosted a realtor conference booth where agents could jump in and grab cash for a few seconds. Bamboo later “merged<\/a>” with iPIX. Both are long gone.<\/p>\n

    A bit of recent panoramic work:<\/p>\n

    \n

    Green Giant in the Palouse<\/a><\/p>\n

    Lincoln Park Zoo View (Chicago)<\/a><\/p>\n

    Longji rice terraces<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Many panoramic, photo, drone and video scenes are available in amuz<\/a> on iPhone<\/a> and Android<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    I’ve shared this post with many others. Please forward links and information to zellmer at gmail dot com so that I may add to this rather crude and simplistic historical log.<\/p>\n

    P.S. Another rather famous and somewhat related IP battle included Peter Hoddie’s “Do you want us to knife the baby?”<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Marketing rhetoric is evergreen. Yet, our collective memory is often short. Redfin’s curious claim to have invented real estate web mapping in 2005 is but one example. Memento Park – Budapest seems appropriate. 360 Rumors published this on Friday, 4 September from Matterport: “They were the first to offer 3D virtual tours where users could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8248"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8261,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248\/revisions\/8261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}