GeoVector

GeoVector Corporation
Information
Industry	Augmented reality, location-based mobile search
Founded	1991
Founder	John Ellenby, Thomas W. Ellenby, Peter M. Ellenby
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States
Notable Personnel	John Ellenby (co-founder, president and CEO; died 2016), Thomas W. Ellenby (co-founder, vice president of intellectual property development), Pamela Kerwin (strategic business development)
Products	Mapion Pointing Appli (with Mapion), Navimon, World Surfer

GeoVector (GeoVector Corporation, originally Criticom Corporation) is an American technology company, headquartered in San Francisco, that developed augmented reality and pointing-based mobile search. It was co-founded by John Ellenby, who earlier founded the laptop maker GRiD Systems, together with Thomas W. Ellenby and Peter M. Ellenby. The company's central idea was "pointing": a handheld device that knows its position and orientation can create a virtual vector into the world and look up the objects that vector intersects in a database indexed by latitude and longitude.

GeoVector filed its first patent on this approach on 10 September 1993, an "electro-optic vision system" that overlays database information on a camera view aligned with the real scene. In 2006 its pointing search launched commercially in Japan on the KDDI network, at a time when no US carrier had announced plans to put compasses in phones. The company later released the World Surfer app for the iPhone and Android, and in 2011 licensed its patents to Microsoft.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked the archived GeoVector company pages and PDFs, the US 5,815,411 patent record, NYT 2006, RCR 2006, the 2007 Mapion release, CNN 2008, TechCrunch/Phone Scoop/iTWire 2011, the Samsung docket and rulings, and The Register 2016 against every claim. About review dates.

History

Origins as Criticom

According to The New York Times, the idea came to John Ellenby and his son Thomas one night in 1991 on a sailboat off the coast of Mexico. Because the elder Ellenby had a poor sense of direction, the two reasoned that combining a compass, a GPS receiver and binoculars would let a user point at a landmark to identify it. The company's own boilerplate likewise dates its pointing and augmented reality work to 1991, and the Australian technology site iTWire reported that GeoVector was founded that year.

The first patent application, filed on 10 September 1993 by John and Thomas Ellenby and assigned to Criticom Corp, was granted as US patent 5,815,411 on 29 September 1998. Its abstract describes a vision system that combines a camera image with data from a database selected by the device's measured position and attitude, so that the added imagery stays "continuously aligned with the real scene as that scene is naturally viewed" by the user. GeoVector's later "About" page says that early work aimed at vertical markets, for example compass-equipped binoculars with GPS that superimposed nautical charts on the horizon to make navigation safer. The same page states that the company once held the trademark for "Augmented Reality" (issued in 1995) and abandoned it as the term came into general use.

The "Little Guy" prototype

An internal GeoVector note records that the "Clipper" project began in 1998, after the first patent filing, to build a handheld "pointable" information appliance with no camera or visual overlay. SET Engineering of Morgan Hill, California, was contracted to make and program it, and four "Little Guy" units plus a program for building their databases were delivered in May 1998. The units were demonstrated in Helsinki, Tokyo and many US locations. The same note says the company was still called Criticom when the project started and went through the interim name Tengotech before settling on GeoVector. The company's milestones page calls the Little Guy the world's first pointing search platform.

New Zealand development lab

In 2002 GeoVector moved its core software development from the United States to New Zealand and set up a technology team in Christchurch, according to a Microsoft .NET customer case study published in September 2002. The case study describes "Welcome to New Zealand" (W2NZ), a Pocket PC application for HP iPAQ handhelds that let visitors point at a hotel, restaurant or cinema to get information about it, or point down a street to find a category of business in that direction. It was written in Visual C# on the .NET Compact Framework with a SQL Server CE database. GeoVector says it contracted Socket Communications in 2002 to make PC cards with a GPS receiver and compass, which it called GeoVector Pointing Cards, for Pocket PCs. It also lists a 2003 location-based game, Real World Doom, in which players fought monsters on the streets of Auckland.

During the 2003 America's Cup races in Auckland, GeoVector ran a trial called Actual Spectator with HP, Microsoft and Vodafone NZ. Guests on spectator boats used HP iPAQ 5450 handhelds fitted with a GeoVector Pointing Card. The card's digital compass supplied the heading, the boat's GPS fixed its position, and race data from Virtual Spectator and Animation Research Ltd arrived over Vodafone's wireless network, so a user could sweep the device across the course to find race boats and marker buoys.

Commercial launch in Japan

GeoVector launched its first commercial product in Japan. According to The New York Times, emergency regulations there required mobile phones to have GPS receivers by 2007, and GeoVector said that by early 2006 enough pointing-capable handsets were on sale in Japan for a commercial launch. The service was introduced in 2006 (in January 2006, according to GeoVector) by the carrier KDDI with NEC Magnus Communications and the map company Mapion. In June 2006 The New York Times reported that it ran on three Sony Ericsson handsets and held descriptive information or advertisements for more than 700,000 locations in Japan. Patrick Bray, GeoVector's representative in Japan, estimated that 1.2 million to 1.5 million compatible handsets had been sold, although the partners did not know how many people were using the free service. RCR Wireless News described the service, which it called GVID, as using network-aided GPS and a handset compass to let users point at nearly 1 million landmarks in Japan, on KDDI's network and Sony Ericsson W21S phones. The same NYT report said Microsoft had underwritten GeoVector development work several years earlier.

On 31 May 2007, Cyber Map Japan released version 2.0 of the Mapion Pointing Appli (マピオン ポインティングアプリ), a BREW application on its official EZweb site for au phones. The release added automatic GPS position updates and finer control of the search angle and distance, and extended support to more compass-equipped handsets (the W21S stayed on version 1.0). Cyber Map Japan credited technical cooperation from GeoVector Corporation in San Francisco, led by president John Ellenby, and from GeoVector K.K. (ジオベクター株式会社) of Minato, Tokyo, led by president Patrick Bray.

In October 2008 CNN reported on Navimon, a GeoVector location game for GPS and compass phones in which players pointed their handsets at places such as Tokyo Tower or 7-Eleven stores to find lost cartoon aliens and help them get home. It was scheduled to launch that month in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, in Japanese only, through KDDI. The article said later versions were planned to show the aliens superimposed on the camera viewfinder. GeoVector's milestones page lists the game's launch in Japan in October 2008.

World Surfer

In 2008 the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, was released in the US with a compass. GeoVector said the arrival of compass-equipped phones let it bring its pointing and AR apps to countries outside Japan. On 23 September 2009 the company announced World Surfer, a directional search app for the iPhone 3GS on AT&T and for Android phones including the T-Mobile G1, the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and Sprint's HTC Hero. A user pointed the phone along a street to find shops, restaurants and other points of interest in that direction, then could open the place's website, call it, see it on a map or follow an on-screen arrow to it. Launch content channels included Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo! Local, Wikipedia, Papa John's restaurants and a Starbucks locator. At launch the app was free on Android Market and cost US$2.99 on the iPhone.

World Surfer 2, announced for the iPhone on 3 February 2010, added free-text search, saved searches and a camera view with augmented reality overlays to help users confirm the distance and direction of a destination.

Licensing and Microsoft agreement

GeoVector says it began a worldwide licensing program in 2010 and signed licensees in Japan and Europe. By 2011 its website said the company was focusing on licensing and on taking its technology to market through partners and licensees. On 13 July 2011 TechCrunch reported that Microsoft had entered a non-exclusive, multi-year licensing agreement giving it rights to use concepts covered by GeoVector's patents. Phone Scoop reported that the licensed patents covered augmented reality, pointing-based local search and other aspects of spatially aware mobile computing, and that terms were not disclosed.

Samsung litigation

On 5 May 2016 GeoVector sued Samsung Electronics in the US District Court for the Northern District of California (case 3:16-cv-02463), alleging that Samsung's Galaxy smartphones infringed its patents and that Samsung had misappropriated its trade secrets. Law360 reported that the complaint asserted US patents 6,037,936, 7,301,536 and 7,916,138. Judge William H. Orrick dismissed the claim of misappropriating trade secrets relating to Galaxy smartphones and tablets on 10 November 2016 as barred by the statute of limitations, with leave to amend. On 14 February 2017, ruling on GeoVector's second amended complaint, he again dismissed the misappropriation claims, finding them barred by the California and New York statutes of limitations. The court docket lists the case as terminated on 17 February 2017.

John Ellenby died at his home in California in August 2016, aged 75. Google Patents lists the 1993 founding patent, US 5,815,411, as expired.

Technology

GeoVector's systems combine three inputs: the device's position from GPS, its heading from a magnetic heading sensor (a magnetometer) and other attitude sensors, and a geographic database of objects stored by latitude and longitude. The software creates a "virtual vector" from the device in the direction it is pointing and returns the objects it intersects, so a search can be refined by the direction of the user's interest rather than by location alone. The 2002 Microsoft case study describes GeoVector's own spatial routines for this, including bounding-rectangle tests, intersections with polygonal, circular and spherical regions, and both flat-earth and spherical-earth geometry depending on distance. It also describes guidance by an arrow that stays locked on a chosen destination however the handheld is turned, rather than by maps.

The company presented pointing as a way to "Click on the Real World", treating the phone like a mouse and the physical world like a desktop. The approach depends on handset sensors. In 2006 The New York Times reported GeoVector's statement that GPS combined with terrestrial radio assistance in Japan routinely gave better than 30 feet of accuracy even in dense urban areas, and that accuracy as close as six feet had been seen in Tokyo trials. CNN noted in 2008 that compass quality varied between phones and that some lost calibration.

Products

Product	Year	Platform	Notes
Little Guy (Clipper project)	1998	Custom handheld	Prototype pointing device without a camera view; four units built by SET Engineering
Welcome to New Zealand (W2NZ)	2002	Pocket PC (HP iPAQ)	Tourist pointing application built on the .NET Compact Framework
GeoVector Pointing Card	2002	Pocket PC PC card	GPS and compass card made by Socket Communications for GeoVector
Actual Spectator	2003	HP iPAQ 5450 with Pointing Card	America's Cup trial with HP, Microsoft and Vodafone NZ
Mapion pointing search / Mapion Pointing Appli	2006 (version 2.0 in May 2007)	KDDI au handsets with GPS and compass	Built with Mapion and NEC; version 2.0 released by Cyber Map Japan
Navimon	2008	KDDI handsets with GPS and compass	Location-based alien-hunting game for Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya
World Surfer	2009	iPhone 3GS, Android	Directional search app with third-party content channels
World Surfer 2	2010	iPhone	Added free-text search, saved searches and a camera-view AR overlay

See also

• Augmented reality
• Mobile AR
• Layar
• Wikitude