Thanks Stephen,
My first encounter with gee-whiz stuff such as what I described was a briefing given at Fort Bragg, NC back in 1987-1988 while I was still working the intelligence business. Some staff officers were down to visit from the Beltway Bandits (aka DoD/Washington D.C.) to give us an overview of what was to come in the future. Things such as computer enhanced maps with details added in using 3D CAD models all fused with digital terrain elevation data to create "virtual terrain" on a computer monitor. All of it was really neat but way out of my pay grade or income bracket. Flash forward a few years and what was shown to me during that briefing was or is pretty much common fare in all computer games now. The other encounter was during a TDY assignment to that very same bunch of Beltway Bandits and the Christians in Action located in the Washington Navy Yard, in a place that has since moved to a new facility but at the time was the "holy grail" assignment location for plebes such as myself and to go there was a real treat. I had a chance encounter with a former army officer I had worked with in Germany that was now employed as a civilian contractor in one of those same CIA shops at this place in the Washington Navy Yard. I was given a quick run down on what they were doing with imagery products. Essentially it was taking the imagery, crunching it in to data that could be further crunched by the computers and the resulting product could then be used to make street views of places that were under observation. Some of this was to support contingency plans for rescue of embassy personnel or for other more dangerous things such counter-terrorism. The image products that were created by these folks were incredible back in 1987-1988 but pale in comparison to what we now consider to be normal screen presentations in most of your FPS video games. Prior to this, most of the street views were done by having some guy with a camera take images of each location (a real hazard in some places) so having the ability to create a "street view" of a location of interest was definitely a real step forward on the ladder of progress. We take a lot of this for granted now but before my encounter with this technology back in 87-88, laptop computers and tablets were still pretty much out of our reach financially and technologically.