Currently, MOVIE is in the advanced design and development process, organized as a sequence of internal prereleases of the system code and documentation. At the time of preparing this document (April 1992), MOVIE 0.4 has been released internally at NPAC. The associated technical documentation now contains manual drafts [Furmanski:92a;92b] and some 25 internal reports (about 700 pages total). The current total size of the MOVIE code, including source, binaries, and custom CASE tools, is on the order of 40 Mb. Both documentation and code will evolve during the next months towards the first external release MOVIE 1.0, planned for the fall 1993. MOVIE 1.0 will be associated with the set of reference/programming manual pairs for all basic system components, discussed later in this paper (MetaShell, MOVIE Server, MovieScript). Starting from MOVIE 1.0, we intend to provide user support, assure backward compatibility, and initiate a series of MOVIE application projects.
This paper discusses the MOVIE System and is considered as a summary of the design and prototype development stage (Section 17.2). It also contains a brief description of the current status and the planned near-term applications. A more complete description can be found in [Furmanski:93a] (see also [Furmanski:93b;93d] for recent overview reports). Here we concentrate on one current application-Terrain Map Understanding (Section 17.3) (see also [Cheng:92a]) and on one planned application area-virtual reality (Section 17.4) (see [Furmanski:92g] for an overview and [Furmanski:93c;93e;93f]
for the current status).