4 ms·
AKA my first experience with patent law. Marching cubes is an incredibly obvious algorithm, and the owners of the patent for it sued people gleefully in my exp
by gilbetron 7y ago
AKA my first experience with patent law. Marching cubes is an incredibly obvious algorithm, and the owners of the patent for it sued people gleefully in my experience. I talked to numerous game and simulation developers at the time and the story was the same: a need to convert volumetric data into a 3D surface, coming up with the obvious approach, get a nasty letter that it was patented.
Very happy when the patent expired.
Condolences to his family, though. He sounds like he was actually a good guy.
- tgb 7y agoThere's also Marching Tetrahedra which wasn't covered by the marching cubes patent and was kindly allowed to be used freely (and had some small improvements). [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_tetrahedra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_tetrahedra
- mhalle 7y agoGE controlled the patent, not Bill. He was also very happy when the patent expired. I would also argue whether it was obvious or not. At the time it was developed, not that many people were doing surface reconstruction of volumetric data. Bill and Harvey came up with Marching and Dividing Cubes to support GE Medical.