Editing Aspen Movie Map (section)

==Purpose and applications==
ARPA funding during the late 1970s was subject to the military application requirements of the  Mansfield Amendment introduced by [[Mike Mansfield]] (which had severely limited funding for [[hypertext]] researchers like [[Douglas Engelbart]]).

The Aspen Movie Map's military application was to solve the problem of quickly familiarizing soldiers with new territory.  The Department of Defense had been deeply impressed by the success of [[Operation Entebbe]] in 1976, where the Israeli commandos had quickly built a crude replica of the airport and practiced in it before attacking the real thing.  DOD hoped that the Movie Map would show the way to a future where computers could instantly create a three-dimensional simulation of a hostile environment at much lower cost and in less time (see [[virtual reality]]).

While the Movie Map has been referred to as an early example of [[interactive video]], it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as a pioneering example of [[interactive computing]]. Video, audio, still images and metadata were retrieved from a database and assembled on the fly by the computer (an Interdata minicomputer running the [[MagicSix]] operating system) redirecting its actions based upon user input; video was the principal, but not sole affordance of the interaction.