The Aspen Movie Map was a revolutionary hypermedia system developed at MIT by a team working with Andrew Lippman in 1978 with funding from ARPA. Hypermedia is a term used as a logical extension of the term hypertext, in which audio, video, plain text, and non-linear hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research and educational institution located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is a widely renowned leader in science and technology, as well as in many other fields, including engineering systems, management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. ... 1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1978 calendar). ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ...

Image File history File links Aspen. ...

Features

The Aspen Movie Map allowed the user to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado. It is an early example of a hypermedia system. View south along Galena Street in downtown Aspen. ... Hypermedia is a term used as a logical extension of the term hypertext, in which audio, video, plain text, and non-linear hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information. ...

A gyroscopic stabilizer with four 16mm stop-frame film cameras was mounted on top of a car with an encoder that triggered the cameras every 10 feet. (The distance was measured from an optical sensor attached to the hub of a bicycle wheel dragged behind the vehicle.) The camera were mounted in order to capture front, back, and side views as the car made its way through the city. Filming took place daily between 10 AM and 2 PM to minimize lighting discrepancies. The car was carefully driven down the center of every street in Aspen, to enable registered match-cuts.

The film was assembled into a collection of discontinuous scenes (one segment per view per city block) and then transferred to laserdisc (aka videodisc), the analog-video precursor to DVD. A database was made that correlated the layout of the video on the disc with the two-dimensional street plan. Thus linked, the user was able to choose an arbitrary path through the city; the only restrictions being the necessity to stay in the center of the street; move ten feet between steps; and view the street from one of the four orthogonal views. Video disc is a general term for a laser- or stylus-readable random-access circular disc that contains both audio and video forms of multimedia. ...

The interaction was controlled through a dynamically-generated menu overlaid on top of the video image: speed view angle were modified by the selection of the appropriate icon through a touch-screen interface. Commands were sent from the client process handling the user input and overlay graphics to a server that accessed the database and controlled the laserdisc players. Another interface feature was the ability to touch any building in the current field of view, and, in a manner similar to the ISMAP feature of web browsers, jump to a façade of that building. Selected building contained additional data: e.g., interior shots, historical images, menus of restaurants, video interviews of city officials, etc., allowing the user to take a virtual tour through those buildings.

Another feature of the system was a navigation map that was overlaid above the horizon in the top of the frame; the map both served to indicate the user’s current position in the city (as well as a trace of streets previously explored) and to allow the user to jump to a two-dimensional city map, which allowed for an alternative way of moving through the city. Additional features of the map interface included the ability to jump back and forth between correlated aerial photographic and cartoon renderings with routes and landmarks highlighted; and to zoom in and out a la the Charles Eames’s Powers of Ten sequence. Charles Ormond Eames, Jr (June 17, 1907 - August 21, 1978) was an American designer, architect and filmmaker who, together with his wife Ray, is responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century. ... Powers of Ten is a 1977 short documentary film which depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten. ...

Aspen was filmed in early fall and winter. The user was able to in situ change seasons on demand while moving down the street or looking at a façade. A three-dimensional polygonal model of the city was also generated, using the Quick and Dirty Animation System, which featured three-dimensional texture-mapping of the facades of landmark buildings, using an algorithm designed by Paul Heckbert. These computer-graphic images, also stored on the laserdisc, were also correlated to the video, enabling the user to view an abstract rendering of the city in real time.

Image File history File links Download high resolution version (450x680, 249 KB) Summary Animation of Aspen from the Aspen Moviemap project, MIT Architecture Machine Group, circa 1979 Licensing File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...

Credits

MIT undergraduate Peter Clay, with help from Bob Mohl and Michael Naimark, filmed the hallways of MIT with a camera mounted on a cart. The film was transferred to a laserdisc as part of a collection of projects being done at the Architecture Machine Group (ArcMac). Media artist Michael Naimark has spent over 25 years exploring place representation through work in field cinematography, interactive systems, and immersive projection. ... The Wiesner Buildings Atrium The MIT Media Lab in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engages in education and research in the digital technology used for expression and communication. ...

The Aspen Moviemap was filmed in the fall of 1978, in winter 1979, and briefly again (with an active gyro stabilizer) in the fall of 1979. The first version was operational in early spring of 1979.

Many people were involved in the production, most notably: Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the Architecture Machine Group, who found support for the project from the Cybernetics Technology Office of DARPA; Andrew Lippman, principal investigator; Bob Mohl, who designed the map overlay system and ran user studies of the efficacy of the system for his PhD thesis; Ricky Leacock, who headed the MIT Film/Video section and shot the Cinéma Vérité interviews placed behind the facades of key buildings; John Borden, of Peace River Films in Cambridge, MA, who designed the stabilization rig; Kristina Hooper of UCSC; Rebecca Allen, Scott Fisher, who matched the photos of Aspen in the silver-mining days from the historical society to the same scenes in Aspen in 1978 and who experiment with anamorphic imaging of the city (using a Volpe lens); Walter Bender, who designed and build the interface, the client/server model, and the animation system; Steve Gregory; Stan Syzaki, who built the much of the electronics; Steve Yelick, who worked on the laserdisc interface and anamorphic rendering; Paul Heckbert, who worked on the animation system; Mark Shirley, who also worked on the animation, Ken Carson; and Mike Naimark, who was at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and was responsible for the cinematography design and production. Nicholas Negroponte Nicholas Negroponte (born 1943) is a Greek-American computer scientist best known as founder and director of Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Media Lab. ... Cinéma vérité is a style of filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques that originated in documentary filmmaking, with the storytelling elements typical of a scripted or semi-scripted film. ... Scott Fisher is an artist and technologist who has worked extensively on virtual reality, including stints at NASA, Atari Research Labs, MITs Architecture Machine Group and Keio University. ... Ken (lesser known surname Carson) is a toy doll in Mattels Barbie line of fashion dolls. ...

Purpose and Applications

ARPA funding during the late 1970s was subject to the military application requirements of the notorious Mansfield Amendment introduced by Mike Mansfield (which had severely limited funding for hypertext researchers like Douglas Engelbart). Mike Mansfield Michael Joseph Mansfield (March 16, 1903 – October 5, 2001) was an American politician from Montana. ... In computing, hypertext is a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which, according to an early definition (Nelson 1970), branch or perform on request. ... Douglas Engelbart Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart (born January 30, 1925 in Oregon) is an American inventor of Norwegian descent. ...

The Aspen Movie Map's military application was to solve the problem of quickly familiarizing soldiers with new territory. The Department of Defense had been deeply impressed by the success of Operation Entebbe in 1976, where the Israeli commandos had quickly built a crude replica of the airport and practiced in it before attacking the real thing. DOD hoped that the Movie Map would show the way to a future where computers could instantly create a three-dimensional simulation of a hostile environment at much lower cost and in less time (See virtual reality). Entebbe Airport, Uganda, scene of Operation Entebbe Operation Entebbe took place on the night of July 3 and early morning of July 4, 1976. ... Virtual reality (VR) is an environment that is simulated by a computer. ...

Political Response

William Proxmire awarded the project one of his Golden Fleece awards. Proxmire was later severely criticized for his shortsightedness by journalist Stewart Brand. William Proxmire (born November 11, 1915) was a member of the Democratic Party who served in the United States Senate for the state of Wisconsin from 1957 to 1989. ... Stewart Brand speaking September 5, 2004 Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an author, editor, and creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly. ...