Sunday, September 27, 2009

Surrogate travel

I have used GoogleMaps for some years now to find the best way reaching a destination - will I be on time on foot? Should I take public transport? Which alternative way to choose? Some time ago I discovered GoogleMaps StreetView functionality and became a huge fan of it as I can '"walk around" in the places I have been to or where I will be in close future and look around as if I was really there. I have become familiar with the house, streets and the surroundings of my future home. I find paths to prefer for walking from one point to another. Maybe I will choose to avoid it in the future to let the new places surprise me and introduce themselves to me in live but at the moment my excitement over the application exceeds the will to wait for getting there.

I have introduced this great novelty to many of my friends and family members. And now I read over the history of hypertext and must admit: there is nothing new in this world, also not StreetView by Google. In 1978 Aspen Movie Map developed by Andrew Lippman and his colleagues at MIT Architecture Machine Group was introduced and said to be probably the first hypermedia system whereas the hypermedia aspects of the system come from accessing these pictures not as a traditional database but as a linked set of information.

I find it better to quote to give the overview of the technology used: "The Aspen system was implemented with a set of videodisks containing photographs of all the streets of the city of Aspen, Colorado. Filming was done by mounting four cameras aimed at 90° intervals on a truck that was driven through all the city streets, each camera taking a frame every ten feet (three meters)." The system also allowed the user to choose the speed of moving around in the city up to 110 km/h and to step into the buildings as they were also filmed from inside. The city was also filmed in different seasons of the year allowing the user to switch the time of the year of "visiting" Aspen.

Visiting different locations of the world like that gives the possibility of surrogate traveling and reaching the best travel target. It can also be an excellent educational environment or used for training soldiers in hypothetical locations.

More on the GoogleMaps StreetView (the original google site for it is not working for some reason):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View

The history of hypertext:
http://www.useit.com/papers/hypertext-history/



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