I was going through some books, looking for ones I could recycle when
I came across "Multimedia Computing: Case Studies from MIT Project
Athena" by Matthew Hodges and Russell Sasnett. (ISBN 0-201-52029-X)
Imagine my surprise to scan through it and see a chapter entitled
"Navigation: Design for a Visual Learning Environment" which is a
paper on a multimedia system that simulates navigating a boat in
Penobscot Bay, Maine. The interface features a panorama across the
top showing where the boat is headed, and below that are readouts
showing a compass heading, a thumbnail view of the boat's heading,
boat speed, and angle-of-view for the panorama. There is an optional
binocular window allowing a zoomed in view of what's ahead. You can
bring up navigational charts, tide charts, a depth finder, and a
loran system. The article mentions "Virtual Reality" as another form
of spatial interface.
There is a diagram on page 91 showing how "An image set contains
eight views, each of which records 45 degrees. Spliced together, they
give a full panorama."
So what? Sounds like any number of CDROMs or websites that have come
and gone in the last eight years.
Well the Navigation videodisc was developed in 1983 by Digital
Equipment Corporation.
What was the computing world like in 1983? Well the IBM PC was just
taking off, and Windows was nowhere to be seen. The visual interface
to the PC was typically a bunch of low-res green glowing phosphor
letters. The command line was king. The Macintosh had not come out
yet. In the minicomputer space, DEC's VAX line was extremely popular.
And panoramas were unheard of on the desktop.
So this work seems to have been truly groundbreaking. Does anyone
remember this stuff?
6:30:16 AM 
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