OBJ E C T O bituary BITUARY Object
The Stanford iRoom 1999-200(?)
When you walked into the Stanford iRoom back in its early years, it radiated the aura of high-tech creative meetings. Vast amounts of information would appear on the seamlessly tiled, 12-projector display that was operated with a digital pen. The richly-crafted wood conference table had a large screen at its center, projecting maps, plans, and other “horizontal-friendly” materials. Devices were scattered in the space to facilitate these interactions: trackballs, PDAs, “air” mice, ultrasonic pens, a teleconferencing camera, and even an “iDog” you could program to bark when you turned it over. Today the room has the feel of a comfortable old garage. Leftover equipment litters the space, most of the screens are now absent or not working, and the conference table has been replaced by a clutch of practical worktables. It’s sad to see the high concept devices go away, but it was their time. The goal of the iRoom (no, the ‘i’ isn’t from Apple, but from “interactive”) was to create a uniform interface that could bring together the many devices that were becoming part of the tech-savvy worker’s toolbox. Stanford faculty from three different areas of computer science—Pat Hanrahan from Graphics, Armando Fox from Systems, and myself from HCI—created the joint research project. My focus was on the phenomenology of interaction— letting users operate in this melange of devices fluently rather than continually throwing them into a puzzle-solving activity of operating multiple menus, commands, and pointers in all of the different interfaces. The overface included moving information from one device to another, creating links from maps to spreadsheets to images, and controlling anything— even the projectors and lights in the room. Experiments flourished, with names such as PointRight, InterfaceCrafter, PostBrainstorm, iStuff, WorkspaceNavigator, FlowScan, the Virtual Auditorium, iPong and iClub (an interactive disco). Some were major research efforts, others more whimsical student projects. In traditional Stanford fashion, some led to successful startups (VSee and TideBreak). The life of the room wasn’t defined by its hardware, but by the rich variety of people, ideas, and projects that inhabited it. In time, projectors burned out and weren’t a priority to replace. Devices became obsolete. Students published papers, graduated and moved on. The room turned into our garage— useful, but a bit shabby. When I go into the iRoom now, I don’t feel the sadness I experienced when my family moved out of our first home in San Francisco and I lay down on the floor and cried. A part of me was left behind. The iRoom never had that kind of charm. My connection is with the people and their work, not the technologies. Rather than a treasured object to be passed down generations, it’s more like a circuit breadboard. I might cry on leaving the project some day, but the iRoom has deservedly gone into retirement, having served its purpose well. 52
Ambidextrous Sensational Spring 2009
Photo by Hyung Suk Kim
by Terry Winograd