To be fair, neither of the two organisations responsible for Horizon over the period in question - Fujitsu Services, formerly ICL Pathway - in any way resemble your pastiche of "YC Offspring" startups.
Indeed, they were the exact opposite: huge multinationals with presumably gigantic legal, infosec and HR policy departments who could probably jump through the various compliance hurdles required by this procurement process in their sleep.
By comparison the startups you're complaining about usually take years to reach sufficient maturity to take part in large public sector procurement processes like this.
Clearly in this case maturity and scale were not a bulwark against incompetence, opacity and mendacity. Indeed the opposite - as I type this the Post Office's lawyers Herbert Smith Freehills are making mealy mouthed justifications for witholding reams of technical evidence from the public enquiry for months. It's disgusting, and as someone running a small business and endlessly having to justify our commitment to information security, data privacy and transparency I find the hypocrisy infuriating.
It's become very clear as the public enquiry has progressed [1] that Fujitsu were:
- aware of several bugs - including ones they'd fully understood the cause and mechanics of - that would induce double-counting of transactions
- aware that criminal prosecutions were underway against users of the system in which just such double-counted transactions would clearly have had a material impact on the case and the evidence aduced
- failed to raise the above in a timely manner, either to the Post Office who had directly requested audit logs, to external auditors, or to the justice system itself
Everything is not 2D. Most of the first-party apps they've showcased are, but both the launch event and subsequent videos + documentation have shown full 3D capabilities, both in VR and MR mode of operation for both first- and third-party apps (including full build support in the Unity engine, meaning a huge number of existing VR + MR apps will be deployable on to AVP relatively quickly if developers choose to invest in porting).
HoloLens was commercially released in 2016 and its successor, the HoloLens 2 in 2019, the latter of which is still available.
And the Google Glass (not 'glasses') would not have allowed 3D in any true sense as it lacked the capability to calculate the user's head pose in space, necessary for 3- or 6-DoF tracking. It was essentially a heads up display attached to your face.
As someone who came to computing through high level software and a little later than many (I wasn't dismantling appliances at age 5 like you hear in a lot of people's origin stories) this was a really empowering ground-up introduction to hardware architecture.
One of the few Coursera courses [1] I actually finished and found rewarding, challenging and fun throughout.
EDIT for tl;dr purposes: the models and textures have almost entirely been developed through public funding over a 20 year period but have recently been trademarked by Bernie Frischer Consulting (AKA Flyover Zone Productions) which this website is serving as a shop window for. Seems pretty sleazy and a bit of a shame to me as: 1) it's a great if slightly patchy resource which sounds like it really should be under public access somehow; 2) a couple of hours in the hands of a decent 3D artist to setup lighting and cameras correctly would do this model so much more justice.
Not sure I follow. You say they have been trademarked. The reference from the article that mentions trademark:
"As a staunch proponent of open data and open access to cultural heritage, I am disappointed to learn that the contributions made in good faith to promote the free and open proliferation knowledge have been commercialized. I am shocked that a project developed largely with taxpayer funding has been trademarked by a private company registered to Bernie Frischer himself."
It seems to me the word trademark actually refers to some kind of copyright? I agree that taxpayer's money should contribute to something that can be reused by others, and/or owned by public institutions. In this case it seems unclear what has happened. Is the data available so anyone can create the same kind of "product" or is the data copyrighted?
I would point you (and anyone else asking similar questions) to the article I linked above as it's well written and definitely better informed than I am.
Briefly, it sounds like the dataset is not copyrighted, but is also no longer publicly accessible. The artifacts produced from it (the 360 VR app, and this fly-through video) are copyrighted, proprietary products being marketed to schools, for profit.
I'm definitely not opposed to the use of open access data sets in creating commercial products, I think that's a great idea and I've done it myself in the past. But it does seem a shame in this case that the people doing the commercialising haven't done a great job of acknowledging others who've done the really hard work of creating the assets in the first place.
