Books Without Pages *

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BOOKS WITHOUT PAGES *

Nicholas Negroponte

Architecture Machine Group Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION

Computer Graphics has been a vector oriented Currently, computer-assisted communication high technology for interaction and its and information access is used at work. images have been those of a silent movie. As such, it is rather easy to evaluate the Current trends toward raster scan in powers of computational search and mani- general are bringing together the previous- pulation in terms of productivity and ly disjoint communities of image process- effectiveness, without great concern for ing, broadcast television and computer the more subjective and subtle matters of graphics. Present implementations in human comforts and deeper meanings. How- video format are making computer graphics ever, as soon as such methods are used in ubiquitous. Jointly, these events are the home, as leisure systems, or for leading to broader definitions of man- personal reasons, users will become machine interaction and more generalized significantly more demanding of the applications of computer resources. The qualities of interaction (i) and less user community is growing to include tolerant of the previously justified people like: presidents of companies, discomforts of computer usage. housewives, six year old children. The book is a wonderful random access medium In this light, this paper is about not for information retrieval and perusal. It throwing away the message with the medium is inexpensive, portable, and of£ers the while offering new technological occasion for personalized landmarks like opportunities for communication. In many annotations and dog ears. While such ob- regards the old fashioned book remains the servations can be construed as nostalgic best random access information resource we or wishful thinking, their computer sur- have, but new opportunities include: rogates should not be dismissed out of personalization, sound synchronization, hand. At first we may be limited to trying spatial data access. to copy the old, but ultimately the new and dynamic media ef interactive information processing.and communication will find their own formats for supreme usability. Such features are no longer a luxury but a necessity.

Combinations of telephone, television, and microprocessing are emerging in a number of different forms, in the service of the consumer. The impetus for these develop- ments is large because consumers come in large numbers. We are beginning to see a number of technological innovations in- vented for the consumer, but creeping into the more institutional marketplace of information management, The optical video- * Work reported herein has been jointly disc is a specific example. It, along funded by the Office of Naval Research with others, w~ll offer richer media for (Contract No. N00014-75-C-0460) and the communication, on the one hand. But, on Defense Advance Research Projects Agency the other hand, it will precipitate con- (Contract No. MDA 903-77-C-0037). The sideration of the human qualities of the title of this paper comes from an ill- interface, previously limited for the most fated NSF proposal Jointly submitted by part to physical and video typewriters. Dr. Richard Bolt (psychologist), Professor Muriel Cooper {graphic designer) and the author, all of MIT's growing ensemble of Arts and Media Technology. 56.1.1

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Top left: close-up of joystick control. Middle and bottom left: a touch sensitive index of SDMS Workbook. Right top, middle and bottom: uslng a touch sensitive world view to move from book to museum map, to the Southeast. Reprint

THE PAGE AS A SYNTACTIC CHUNK PAGES WITHOUT PAPER

Scrolling text on a computer terminal is The optical videodisc illustrated below is so commonplace that it may be alarming to a particularly new and important medium question it. But really it is rather for information dissemination. The page dreadful. Most of the time it cannot be counterpart is a frame, of which 54,000 read when moving. Almost all of the time are available today, on a randomly access- it gives the user absolutely no sense of ible basis, at very low cost. In the where he or she is vis-a-vis some whole. computer community 54,000 or 54K is an insignificant number when measuring, for We take for granted the semantic constructs example, bits, bytes, or words of memory. of grammar. A sentence carries a statement But 54,000 slides or 54,000 pages is quite or question and a paragraph can be said to a different matter. A PhD student of Art develop or support an idea. One way or History does not encounter 54,000 art another, chapters, subsections, paragraphs slides in his or her education, probably and sentences can be seen as descending, career. 54,000 pages is more than the semantic boundaries. Encyclopedia Britanica with all its annual updates. But there are also syntactic boundaries tied to the medium of presentation more The pictures on the following page are than to the information content. The a~ taken from a student thesis (2). As is an excellent example. The ideas in a illustrated, the text is almost print letter or a book clearly do not fall on quality, does not scintillate, and has all page boundaries. But one remembers a three the letter size and spacing variables page love letter or nine hundred page common to printing. In addition, with the novel partly as such. A recent directive small overhead of animation, pages are from the National Science Foundation has flipped from the upper right to the lower limited proposals to fifteen pages. left. On the previous color page, user interaction is illustrated as an actual Unanswered questions about computer media finger flipping gesture on a touch sensi- include: are there similar chunks? what tive pad embedded in the arm of a leather purposes do they serve? what use does the easychair. sense of place serve? are there meaningful gestalts? The purpose of this paper, accompanied by video tapes and verbal presentation at the IEEE meeting on communications, is not to answer these "Simply stated, questions, but to pose them as serious issues. human factors for

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ASCII TEXT DISPLAY sge" This is a page of ASCII tezt of A/splayed by the new 85 font systen. |or The font smster is stortd "off screen" r pixel starting at page 0 of the extended ~oory. As the ASCII text is parsed, ~y each character is "moved', via the aLicrocode, to the appropriate spot in ~lay the currently visible space, :o TI~ fonts are two bits per pixel. Associated with each font is • )late location table giving its bits of ¢ooordinetes on the invisible Ig t he read-ismge. ~Iso with the font is a above, one diaensionel kerning table. The te ore kerning table is stored in progree and mory during the fornstting phase page o( d/.sp2ay. ,s The page is flipped by scratching is

!t~ aplXol~iate dJzecti@ am • . ito~hr'w~iti~1oy-WL A i~ & ~ tvo psges (4 cupy/~j the low the 8 bit per piml S! the other Im two bits. By o! matrix, display i1: one page to tl ws Are a template -order four bits of h By modifying the c( es mentioned above, rq f the template ere o~ shadows back and k, age. As the paqe Lng exposed is o shadovs. currant page is

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TALKING PAGES PERSONALIZED PAGES

In the same way that it will become diffi- As computational resources increase in cult to buy a calculator or television power and decrease in cost, we hear more that does not tell time, it is this and more about the so-called "personal author's fee~ing that it soon will become computer." This is an unfortunate name, difficult to buy machines that do not talk. given the true thrust of the movement at The recent introduction of the toy 'Speak this time. The computers about which & Spell' is a marvelous example of sound people are talking are not really personal synch display.* Applied to the more and in no sense personalized (3). Instead, general concept of books without pages, they are available at sufficiently low cost two particular applications are being so as not to have to share them. examined at this time: mode and medium switching, spatial sound. Personalization comes in two flavors. The easiest form of personalizatlon to achieve It is a common prograIm~ing practice to is that of variety. If the choices are assume a mode and medium of presentation large enough, individual selection can be for particular data. This is especially seen as a mild form of personalization: true in computer graphics, wherein the print in preferred type fonts, right handed database is frequently polluted by the versus left handed, and the like. At the "line" construct of drawing practice. It other extreme, the most difficult to is also true for text. However, there are achieve, is personalization that comes from many reasons to wish for switching between knowing. Human-to-human discourse enjoys a media, with the same information. For wide range of abbreviations and subtleties example, it is hard to browse through gained through familiarity, shared meta- sound. At the same time, one can imagine phors, and the complicated mechanisms of addressing a piece of equipment with hands inference making. and eyes, wishing for the assembly instruc- tions to be spoken, one by one. There are some middle-ground examples that begin to illustrate a kind of Z-axis for The spatiality of sound is more adventure- books without pages. Early implementations some. Here we are suggesting a cocktail of our Spatial Data Management System (SDMS) party effect, where quadraphonic or octa- (4,5) were a laminar of "pages." More phonic sound systems produce spatially information or elaborations were gained by localized sound. A proposed example is literally flying through words or pictures. for verbal annotations to be placed on a Their expansions can be made very personal page, in specific places, by a specific and invoked implicitly. A simple example reader. Return to these annotations is in a text processing application is the achieved by a kind of Flatland where the automatic expansion of acronyms that one user can roam about the surface, listening does not know or has forgotten since last to all the sounds in parallel, but properly reading. attenuated as a function of their distance. How many times have you overheard your own A slightly more ambitious example of a name at a cocktail party? personalized page can be derived from work currently being done on "personalized movies." These are movies whose apparent content, form and medium is the intersec- tion of a set of resources and a model of the user contained in a computerized play- back system. A cookbook created this way is an exemplar: Consider the proverbial instruction "cook until done." (6) This is meaningful to the experienced chef. A less qualified cook may need to know the time and temperature; a beginner may need to be reminded to preheat the oven, and to place the dish on the center rack. Re- visiting this recipe, the fast learning tyro may ~eed only a reminder of the oven heat, whereas a forgetful expert may need * The technological achievement of this to be reminded of all of the steps again, particular device is remarkable and well but in brief form. acclaimed. In the context of this paper, it hls an additional property which is so obvious we tend to overlook it. That is: portability. The unit and its batteries are small and light enough to curl up with in bed, take on airplanes or in cars, and to put on a shelf! 56.1.6 Reprint

BOOKS IN WHICH WE MIGHT LIVE REFERENCES

SDMS has the added theme of the human (i) N. Negroponte, "New 0ualities of interface. The terminal is itself a Computer Interactions," invited paper, room, currently equipped with floor to Proceedings of the IEEE International ceiling display (twice as large as the one Conference on Cybernetics. and Society, illustrated), octaphonic sound, position Tokyo/Kyoto, November 3-7, 1978. sensing devices for body and arm movements, and soon to get a formidable eye tracking (2) Christopher Schmandt, "Pages without system and continuous speech recognizer. Paper," unpublished Bachelors Thesis, This gaggle of equipment is assembled with Department of Computer Science, MIT, the idea of going to the fullest extreme Cambridge, January 1979. of human interfacing, leaving no channel untapped and no mode or medium of presen- (3) N. Negroponte, Idiosyncratic Systems, tation unused. We propose that later one ONR Report NN-100-1, March 1977. can retrench from such hyperbole, evaluat- ing the effectiveness of one method or (4) N. Negroponte and Craig Fields, "Using another, but that the human interface can New Clues to Find Data," Proceedings of no longer be ameliorated by baby stepping 3rd International Very Large Data Base with small incremental changes. Conference, Tokyo, 1977.

The Media Room (9) is a place. The user is (5) Richard A. Bolt, Spatial Data- not perched in front of a small black and Management - Interim Report, DARPA, MIT white window (polluted by fan noise). Architecture Machine Group, Cambridge, MA, Instead, the user is invited to engage with November 1977. human size displays, arm wave, or rest back and listen. At first thought one can (6) N. Negroponte and Andrew Lippman, imagine a circus or world's fair. But more Idiosyncratic Systems: Personallzed Movies like books without pages, one can envisage as Instructiona~ Aids Go Maintenance and a universal encyclopedia that takes you to Repair, Proposal'to Office of Naval Patagonia, singe Cosi Fan Tutti, animates Research, January 1979. the preparation of Coulibiac, or monitors the progress of herpes zoster. (7) R.A. Bolt, Spatial Data-Management, DARPA Report, MIT Architecture Machine Group, March 1979.

(8) W.C. Donelson, "Spatial Management of Information," Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '78 Conference, Atlanta, GA, August 1978.

(9) N. Negroponte, "Media Room," The ProceedlngR of the Society for Ino~ation Display, Vol. 21, No. 1, 1980 (forthcoming.)

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