Re:Another failure of the 'obviousness' test (Score 0)

After skimming the patent, I don't think the intention was to patent the matrix math you speak of. In fact, they cite the venerable reference by Foley and Van Dam(1983) and others as the source for alot of the 3d math.

I think what they wanted dibs on was spherical panning where (I think) the user specifies a radial distance between the view camera and the object origin, along with a pan attribute (known nowadays as a translation).

If you were to think about it, this is just a specific application of the world view/perspective matrix model that is used in open gl/directx. Also, there are many ways to mathematically get the equivalent camera postions without specifying a radius/pan parameter (quaternions for example) so I don't know how they could enforce this patent without source code/fishing.