First interactive 3D map

The Interactive Movie Map (also known as the Aspen Movie Map) was an experimental 3D "Surrogate Travel System" created by a team led by Andrew Lippman and Nicholas Negroponte at the MIT Media Lab between October 1977 and September 1980. It consisted of a 3D reconstruction of the town of Aspen, Colorado, USA, texture-mapped using thousands of photographs taken by a vehicle fitted with multiple stop-motion cameras. Users could navigate around the virtual town using a touch-screen display, which also controlled a zoom function, the ability to switch between winter and summer views, and links to hyperlinked picture galleries and documents.

The process of making the map was slow and laborious. The 3D map of the town was created using computer-aided design software to draw in each building by hand, and the process of mapping the pictures to the models also had to be done manually. By contrast, modern street-mapping systems such as Google Street View use a combined lidar scanner and camera to record 3D models and pictures at the same time. These are then stitched together and associated with GPS data (which didn't exist in 1980) by powerful machine-learning programs at Google headquarters.

The project was funded by the Cybernetics Research Division of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who were interested in a system that could create virtual reconstructions of distant places for training soldiers. This is something DARPA is still pursuing – present-day DARPA-backed systems such as Lockheed Martin's "Hydra Fusion" create high-definition 3D maps in real time from data collected by drones.