Immersive Displays for the Individual, the Group, and for Networked Collaboration

Despite unprecedented progress in information technology over the past quarter century, the fundamental interface between users and their personal computers remains the same as that first demonstrated by the XPARC Alto in 1973. That system was a brilliant advance over the then-current state of the art. However, its vision—Alan Kay’s notion of a computer as a personal “dynamic book”—is closer to the ultimate portable computer than to the ultimate office environment. We are developing an approach based on several beliefs: 1) the user will find useful computer-generated imagery over a much larger field of view, and with many more pixels, than provided by today’s computer screens; 2) users would rather work in their daily office environment that is always available than in a specialized facility that has to be shared and scheduled; 4) the size of the user’s office is not likely to increase significantly in the future; 5) much of the work in the future, as today, is likely to be a mixture of solo personal work and interaction with one or two people either locally or at a distance.