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.
Features
The Aspen
Movie Map allowed the user to take a virtual tour—travel
surrogately—through the city of Aspen, Colorado
. It is an early example of a
hypermedia system.
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 cameras 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 a.m. and
2 p.m. 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, the analog-video precursor to
DVD technology. 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.
A Quick and Dirty Animation System
rendering of Aspen
The interaction was controlled through a dynamically-generated menu
overlaid on top of the video image: speed and viewing angle were
modified by the selection of the appropriate icon through a
touch-screen interface, harbinger of the ubiquitous
interactive-video kiosk. 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.
In a later implementation, the
metadata,
which was in large part automatically extracted from the animation
database, was encoded as a digital signal in the analog video. The
data encoded in each frame contained all the necessary information
to enable a full-featured surrogate-travel experience.
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
Charles Eames’s Powers of Ten
film.
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 (
QADAS), 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.
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).
The Aspen Movie Map 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 along with MS student
Marek Zalewski 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 built
the interface, the client/server model, and the animation system;
Steve Gregory;
Stan Sasaki, who built the much of the
electronics;
Steve Yelick, who worked
on the laserdisc interface and anamorphic rendering;
Eric "Smokehouse" Brown, who built the metadata
encoder/decoder; Paul Heckbert worked on the animation system;
Mark Shirley and
Paul Trevithick, 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.
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).
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).
While the Movie Map has been referred to as an early example of
interactive video, it is perhaps
more accurate to describe it as a pioneering example of
interactive computing. Video, audio,
still images, and metadata were retrieved from a database and
assembled on the fly by the computer (an Interdata minicomputer
running the
MagicSix operating system)
redirecting its actions based upon user input; video was the
principal, but not sole affordance of the interaction.
Political response
William Proxmire awarded the
project one of his
Golden Fleece
Awards. Proxmire was later severely criticized by journalist
Stewart Brand.
See also
References
- Video The Interactive Movie Map: A Surrogate Travel
System, January 1981, The Architecture Machine, at the MIT
MediaLab Speech Interface Group; Youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6LkqgXPMU.
- Bender, Walter, Computer animation via optical video
disc, Thesis Arch 1980 M.S.V.S., Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
- Brand, Stewart, The Media Lab, Inventing the Future at
MIT (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 141.
- Brown, Eric, Digital data bases on optical videodiscs,
Thesis E.E. 1981 B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Clay, Peter, Surrogate travel via optical videodisc,
Thesis Urb.Stud 1978 B.S., Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
- Heckbert, Paul, " Survey of Texture Mapping," IEEE Computer
Graphics and Applications, Nov. 1986, pp. 56–67.
- Lippman, Andrew, "Movie-maps: An application of the optical
videodisc to computer graphics," Proceedings of the 7th annual
conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques,
Seattle, Washington, United States, 1980, pp. 32–42.
- Mohl, Robert, Cognitive space in the interactive movie map
: an investigation of spatial learning in virtual
environments, Thesis Arch 1982 Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute
of Technology.
- Yelick, Steven, Anamorphic image processing, Thesis
E.E. 1980 B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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