What Do Digital Domain’s 3D Patents Cover? Read Them Here

Wow, half way through the patents here but the arguement for pre-existing art is pretty strong.  First off, all scrolling games basically performed the horizontal image displacement technique to acheive depth.  All of the original siggraph animations (1993/4/5?) all used similar techniques to illustrate 3D on basic NTSC televisions and projectors.  Remember, that in order to achieve a 3D look on an NTSC television (or any interlace screen) you have to take the source image, and render it from two viewpoints one for each eye.  This involves taking the source image and displacing every other line for the opposite eye.  Is this roto, no but then people have been doing wireframe removal with motion tracking for way longer than this and that act involved using roto to fill backgrounds that would have been revealed by the wires in 3D.  But the real killer is that I remember working with in-three at the time and even back then, they used off the shelf tools (fusion, photoshop, etc) and you could tell that they did not have a ‘technique’ in fact they were exploring every bit as much as everyone else at the time.Bottom line however is that they took existing techniques, and existing tools, and adapted them to solve clearly obvious problems using the most obvious methods possible at the time.  No inventions involved.  brass balls indeed