Birth of Multimedia (A Footnote)

In Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte points to the Aspen Project, an early venture of the MIT Media Lab, as the “birth of multimedia.” The 1978 project involved a visual mapping of Aspen, Colorado, using video disk technology to methodically capture and store sequential images of every street (in both directions, one frame every three feet) from a first-person perspective. The resulting video archive allowed its users to recreate the experience of driving a car through the streets of the virtual town, reversing direction, turning at intersections, going around the block, etc.

Recently I came across an account of a strikingly similar experiment, but this time carried out over thirty years earlier. It involved the wartime rehearsals for the British glider landings at Pegasus Bridge, outside of Caen, on the eve of the D-Day invasion. The following is from Stephen E. Ambrose, Pegasus Bridge:

Calling on the British movie industry for help, the Air Ministry had put toghether a film. By flipping through thousands of photographs, each ever so slightly different, the producers made a “moving picture” that depicted the actual flight the pilots would make on D-Day. There was a running commentary.

“The viewer felt as if he were in the cockpit and flying the thing,” Wallwork recalls. The commentary told altitude, airspeed, location. When the glider cast off, “You got the whole sensation of diving a thousand feet and seeing the fields of France coming up toward you.” Level off, turn, turn again, then the bridges were in view. “You come into this fly-in,” as Wallwork describes the film, “and you are still on this bearing and the next thing you saw was the tower of the bridge getting nearer and nearer and then the film cuts out as you crash [landed].” The pilots could see the film whenever they wanted, and they watched it often. “It was absolutely fantastic,” Wallwork declares. “Invaluable.” (80)

Importantly, the training film was not “interactive” in the manner of the Aspen Project. The pilots could not opt to change course or otherwise intervene in the linear progression of the film. Still, I suspect this incident deserves a footnote somehwere in the history of film, simulation, and immersive media, no?