IGDA Call To Arms Patent 4,734,690

From the IGDA March Newsletter

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There is an ongoing patent litigation case in the Eastern District of Texas
of interest to all developers because of how broadly the Plaintiff appears
to want to apply the claims of the patent. In this case, American Video
Graphics, L.P. ("Plaintiff") has sued sixteen game publishers, alleging
that these defendants infringe AVG's U.S. Patent No. 4,734,690, "Method and
Apparatus for Spherical Panning." See Jim Charne's commentary in this
month's Famous Last Words:
http://www.igda.org/columns/lastwords/lastwords_Mar05.php

Plaintiff has identified over 1000 accused games, which Plaintiff alleges
infringe their '690 patent. The '690 patent abstract states: "A graphics
display terminal performs a pan operation with respect to a view motion
center to effectuate spherical panning, thereby providing perspective and
non-perspective views. Three dimensional instructions stored in terminal
memory are re-transformed in accordance with a panned direction..." Full
patent details available at the USPTO:
http://tinyurl.com/62sjj

More specifically, we are looking for prior art (textbooks, references,
articles, or other publications) with a date of publication of before July
23, 1983 which would invalidate the '690 patent. This art must cover the
claims of the patent, including a method and system which defines a "first"
and a "second three-dimensional coordinate modeling space"; with a "viewing
space being movable at a selected radial distance around a selected
reference point in the modeling space;" and effects a "transform of the
coordinates of the object to the viewing space and to a two-dimensional
coordinate screen space." Further, ideally the prior art would also
provide a method whereby the user can change the pitch, yaw or roll of the
viewing space, and also specify a radial distance at which the object may
be viewed.

If you know of any such prior art, please contact the IGDA's IP Rights
Committee at ipr@igda.org as soon as possible.
http://www.igda.org/committees/ipr.php
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Before anyone screams this is an April Fools joke (like I orginally thought) check out the above urls.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=4734690.WKU.&OS=PN/4734690&RS=PN/4734690

Is a government link and I highly doubt they have joined in on a prank, and all the infomation seems to be valid. A quick search on google will show that this is either accurate or the biggest prank ever created (which I highly doubt).