Aspen Movie Map

• The Streets of San Diego
• Fitch's Street Sign Gallery
• Fitch's UCSD Art Gallery

Background

Andrew Lippman and his group at the MIT Architecture Machine Group (now part of the Media Lab) developed what is probably the first true hypermedia system, in 1978. The Aspen Movie Map was a surrogate travel application that allowed the user to enjoy a simulated ride through the city of Aspen.

The system used a set of videodisks containing photographs of all the streets of Aspen, Colorado. Recording was done by means of four cameras, each pointing in a different direction, and mounted on a truck. Photo's were taken every 3 meters. The user could always continue straight ahead, back up, move left or right. Each photo was linked to the other relevant photos for supporting these movements. In theory the system could display 30 images per second, simulating a speed of 200 mph (330 km/h). The system was artificially slowed down to at most 10 images per second, or 68 mph (110 km/h).

To make the demo more lively, the user could stop in front of some of the major buildings of Aspen and walk inside. Many buildings had also been filmed inside for the videodisk.

The system used two screens, a vertical one for the video and a horizontal one that showed the street map of Aspen. The user could point to a spot on the map and jump directly to it instead of finding her way through the city.

The Aspen Movie Map, realized by the Architectural Machine Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1970's, was a new kind of vehicle: a combination of the video-disk and the computer allowed us to traverse an urban landscape, to look around, turn at the crossroads, even peer into people's houses without actually "being there". Indeed, few people had heard about the little town of Aspen, Colorado, where the "daring and enterprising artists" of the MIT group had transported their "heavy and cumbrous [cinemato]graphic baggage", meticulously shooting each and every street from a moving car. Later, the footage was transferred on a computer-controlled video-disk; the linearity of the filmed sequences was broken and the user was given the possibility of selecting one's own routes. The paradoxical experience of the presence-in-absence made possible by the project has been called by many names: "surrogate travelling", "virtual world voyaging", or "movie mapping".

In the late 1960's and 1970's, research on a number of fronts formed the basis of VR as it appears today. Projects such as the Aspen Movie Map, developed by a group of researchers including Andrew Lippman, Michael Naimark and Scott Fisher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), showed video images of Aspen, Colorado, that visitors could actually navigate by indicating their choices on a touch-sensitive display screen. Videoplace, one of several experimental artistic environments designed by arts scholar Myron Krueger, used computers to create what Krueger called "artificial reality," allowing viewers to interact with computer-generated graphics and projected images.

(actual town of Aspen, CO)

The concepts that were first envisioned by Bush remained in the imagination of other pioneers. In 1978, the first hypermedia system was created by Andrew Lippman and his colleagues at MIT. The system was called the Aspen Movie Map which was an application that allowed the user to take a simulated "drive" through the city of Aspen on a computer screen.

Surrogate travel, has been around in a graphical form for over 15 years. The concept of first person POV has been used to convey a sense of place to a user interacting with a computer. The nature of the interaction has varied quite a bit depending on the context of the application. In the late seventies the "Aspen Movie Map" work at the Architecture Machine Lab (now known as the Media Lab) at MIT pioneered the concept of real time surrogate travel with photo realistic images [Donelson][Lippman]. The movie map work was extended to the use of these environments as front ends to information [Bolt][Herot]. More recently Apple Computer is in the process of commercializing the concept of first person POV interfaces with QuickTime VR [Quinlan]. Travel though an abstract space such as a hierarchical file system has been demonstrated with Silicon Graphics' FSN [FSN].

[Lippman] Lippman, A. "Movie-Maps: An Application of the Optical Videodisc to Computer Graphics, Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH 1980.