Google needs a new name for its wicked Holodeck
When Google showed off a way of navigating Street View in a fully immersive room of flat-panel screens at the I/O conference in May, there was a collective web cry of — uh, awesome!
Informally dubbed the “Holodeck,” the room had a chair in the center and a joystick that let you “drive” around. (See the video below applied to Google Earth.)
But alas, the name “Holodeck” is not meant to be.
Paramount Pictures filed for the trademark back in 1992 when Star Trek: The Next Generation was popular and its characters dipped in and out of virtual worlds through a “Holodeck” on-board the Enterprise.
And that’s not anywhere you’d want to go: Paramount’s parent company Viacom has been embroiled in a longstanding $1 billion lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube. Plus, the film studio just revitalized the franchise over the summer with its latest “Star Trek” movie.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shows that Paramount’s trademark status is dead at the moment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they couldn’t revive it or that it would be a smart idea to throw salt on old wounds amid a contentious $1 billion anti-piracy dispute.
So Google’s going by the decidedly less cool name of “Liquid Galaxy” for now. Got better ideas? Put ‘em below!
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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler
Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.
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