We report on a project that explored emerging technologies for intuitive and unobtrusive information interfaces in a compelling setting. An installation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was part of a public exhibit and included an interactive table that presented information associated with the exhibit to the gallery visitors without visible conventional computing elements. The enabling devices included noncontact sensing of low-cost tags in physical icons, electrostatic detection of hand location in three dimensions, and sensor fusion through lightweight Internet Protocol access. A dvances in computing technology and the advent of the Internet have brought about dramatic increases in the amounts of information available to people. However, the interfaces used to handle this information have not changed much with time: the mouse, the keyboard, and the computer monitor, connected to a box containing the processor and its peripherals. The mouse and the keyboard are nonintuitive interfaces. Touch-typing, as an example, is a skill that takes significant experience or training to acquire, because the layout of the standard computer keyboard groups letters in a nonintuitive fashion. Also, the boxes for the processor and the monitors have, over time, gotten smaller, quieter, and cheaper, but are essentially the same, typically unsightly, and occupy visible space. More importantly perhaps, they cut users off from the rest of the world: sitting in front of a computer often means ignoring the surrounding environment. Much technology has been developed in disparate pieces to enable the vision of embedding computing power into everyday objects such as clothing and furniture. There have been some projects such as the Brain Opera 1,2 that cross the boundaries of individual, small-scale demonstrations and have explored the issues of interconnecting these disparate pieces, but these have been few and far between. Based on common interests in the potential application of these technological goals, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and the MIT Media Laboratory agreed to a collaboration driven by the desire to increasingly use technology in their exhibits without making aesthetic concessions. Their main motivation was to use smart spaces 3 in museum exhibits, without the obvious elements of the associated computing. They offered a very useful error metric that is lacking in a laboratory: a very high aesthetic sensibility. In many Media Lab demonstrations, the visual appearance is a distant second to the functionality of the technology. The museum was unwilling to compromise the appearance of the exhibit spaces as a result of any such limitations. The collaboration centered on the Un-Private House, an exhibition of architectural projects that offered interesting blends of public and private spaces. A significant amount of information about the projects was in electronic form, and, traditionally, this information is presented through computer
The Interactive Table REF at the Museum of Modern Art used a physical Lazy Susan on a table to display information, similar in concept to the Lazy Susan shown in Figure 1 (a).
An installation of interactive furniture
IBM Syst. J.
IBM Syst. J.
Computer Science