Influences
Google Earth can be traced directly back to a small company named Autometric, now a part of Boeing. A team at Autometric, led by Robert Cowling, created a visualization product named Edge Whole Earth. Bob demonstrated Edge to Michael T. Jones. Chris Tanner, and others at SGI in 1996. Several other visualization products using imagery existed at the time, including Performer-based ones, but Michael T. Jones stated emphatically that he had "never thought of the complexities of rendering an entire globe..." The catch phrase "from outer space to in your face" was coined by Autometric President Dan Gordon, and used to explain his concept for personal/local/global range. Edge blazed a trail as well in broadcasting, being used in 1997 on CBS News with Dan Rather, in print for rendering large images draped over terrain for National Geographic, and used for special effects in the feature film Shadow Conspiracy in 1997. In 2000, Edge Viewer was made available through the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for free.
Gordon was a huge fan of the ‘Earth’ program described in Neal Stephenson's sci-fi classic Snow Crash. Indeed, a Google Earth co-founder claimed that Google Earth was modeled after Snow Crash, while another co-founder said it was inspired by the short science education film Powers of Ten. In fact Google Earth was at least partly inspired by a Silicon Graphics demo called "From Outer Space to in Your Face" which zoomed from space into the Swiss Alps then into the Matterhorn. This launch demo was hosted by an Onyx 3000 with InfiniteReality4 graphics, which supported Clip Mapping and was inspired by the hardware texture paging capability (although it did not use the Clip Mapping) and "Powers of Ten". The first Google Earth implementation called Earth Viewer emerged from Intrinsic Graphics as a demonstration of Chris Tanner's software based implementation of a Clip Mapping texture paging system and was spun off as Keyhole Inc. Earth Viewer was the inevitable ultimate realization of the capabilities of a seamless texture paging system and many of the individuals working on Earth Viewer were Silicon Graphics alumni.
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Famous quotes containing the word influences:
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet drink and botanical medicines.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at what is inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)