I don't mind dramatization, but 4.5h seems quite steep for such a simple video that seems like it could be covered in a 20m Youtube video. Do you have a rough review if you ended up watching more of it if it's just really dragged on or actually contains a lot of content?
It was also a nice way of teaching my wife about what the world of computers was like in the 90's.
I found it funny - in a “how ridiculous/silly” kind of way - that at 4:40 we get to look inside a building by entering through its windows, but here we are in the 21st century with that exact capability. Individuals providing photos and/or footage of the interior of their commercial space does not seem so silly these days.
That's a 6-dof spacemouse, still widely used today in CAD and 3d modeling.
What an interesting input device.
In 1994, SGI workstations could pull off this kind of stuff rather effortlessly, the only "tricky" part was to get the LOD algorithm right.
So not that mind-blowing in practice.
It would only amazing if Terravision ran on a stock PC (did it?).
Yeah, IIRC, those were the high-end of the SGI line, very beefy machines for that time, especially for I/O and graphics, so I stand by my comment.
[EDIT]: And thanks for clip mapping reference. For anyone interested in dynamic LOD algorithms, here's the paper:
The actual demo of Terravision is indeed mind blowing if you remember how powerful computers in 1994 were: http://www.joachimsauter.com/img/big693.mp4