Aspen Movie Map - Credits

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; 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, 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 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.