Aspen Movie Map
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 modern digital optical disc storage technologies such as DVDs.
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.
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 à la Charles Eames's Powers of Ten film.
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.
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; Richard Leacock (Ricky), 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, Massachusetts, who designed the stabilization rig; Kristina Hooper Woolsey 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 experimented 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 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; Howard Eglowstein; and Michael Naimark, who was at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and was responsible for the cinematography design and production.
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).
