| Recorded at | February 02, 1984 |
|---|---|
| Event | TED1984 |
| Duration (min:sec) | 25:06 |
| Video Type | TED Stage Talk |
| Words per minute | 185.18 fast |
| Readability (FK) | 60.73 easy |
| Speaker | Nicholas Negroponte |
| Country | United States of America |
| Occupation | architect, investor, writer |
| Description | American computer scientist |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
With surprising accuracy, Nicholas Negroponte predicts what will happen with CD-ROMs, web interfaces, service kiosks, the touchscreen interface of the iPhone and his own One Laptop per Child project.
| 1 | 00:12 | In this rather long sort of marathon presentation, | ||
| 2 | 00:16 | I've tried to break it up into three parts: | ||
| 3 | 00:18 | the first being a whole lot of examples on how it can be | ||
| 4 | 00:23 | a little bit more pleasurable to deal with a computer | ||
| 5 | 00:27 | and really address the qualities of the human interface. | ||
| 6 | 00:30 | And these will be some simple design qualities | ||
| 7 | 00:33 | and they will also be some qualities of, if you will, | ||
| 8 | 00:36 | the intelligence of interaction. | ||
| 9 | 00:38 | Then the second part will really just be examples of new technologies -- | ||
| 10 | 00:42 | new media falling very much into that mold. | ||
| 11 | 00:46 | Again, I will go through them as fast as possible. | ||
| 12 | 00:49 | And then the last one will be some examples | ||
| 13 | 00:52 | I've been able to collect, which I think | ||
| 14 | 00:56 | illustrate this at least as best I can, in the world of entertainment. | ||
| 15 | 01:02 | People have this belief -- and I share most of it -- | ||
| 16 | 01:08 | that we will be using the TV screens or their equivalents | ||
| 17 | 01:12 | for electronic books of the future. But then you think, | ||
| 18 | 01:15 | "My God! What a terrible image you get when you look at still pictures on TV." | ||
| 19 | 01:20 | Well, it doesn't have to be terrible. | ||
| 20 | 01:22 | And that is a slide taken from a TV set | ||
| 21 | 01:26 | and it was pre-processed to be very sympathetic to the TV medium, | ||
| 22 | 01:30 | and it absolutely looks beautiful. | ||
| 23 | 01:33 | Well, what's happened? How did people get into this mess? | ||
| 24 | 01:39 | Where you are now, all of a sudden, | ||
| 25 | 01:41 | sitting in front of personal computers | ||
| 26 | 01:43 | and video text -- teletext systems, | ||
| 27 | 01:47 | and somewhat horrified by what you see on the screen? | ||
| 28 | 01:50 | Well, you have to remember that TV was designed | ||
| 29 | 01:53 | to be looked at eight times the distance of the diagonal. | ||
| 30 | 01:56 | So you get a 13-inch, 19-inch, whatever, TV, | ||
| 31 | 02:01 | and then you should multiply that by eight | ||
| 32 | 02:03 | and that's the distance you should sit away from the TV set. | ||
| 33 | 02:06 | Now we've put people 18 inches in front of a TV, | ||
| 34 | 02:11 | and all the artifacts that none of the original designers expected to be seen, | ||
| 35 | 02:16 | all of a sudden, are staring you in the face: | ||
| 36 | 02:18 | the shadow mask, the scan lines, all of that. | ||
| 37 | 02:21 | And they can be treated very easily; | ||
| 38 | 02:23 | there are actually ways of getting rid of them, | ||
| 39 | 02:26 | there are actually ways of just making absolutely beautiful pictures. | ||
| 40 | 02:32 | I'm talking here a little bit about display technologies. | ||
| 41 | 02:35 | Let me talk about how you might input information. | ||
| 42 | 02:38 | And my favorite example is always fingers. | ||
| 43 | 02:42 | I'm very interested in touch-sensitive displays. | ||
| 44 | 02:44 | High-tech, high-touch. Isn't that what some of you said? | ||
| 45 | 02:48 | It's certainly a very important medium for input, | ||
| 46 | 02:55 | and a lot of people think that fingers are a very low-resolution | ||
| 47 | 02:58 | sort of stylus for inputting to a display. | ||
| 48 | 03:02 | In fact, they're not: it's really a very, very high-resolution input medium -- | ||
| 49 | 03:06 | you have to just do it twice, you have to touch the screen | ||
| 50 | 03:09 | and then rotate your finger slightly -- | ||
| 51 | 03:12 | and you can move a cursor with great accuracy. | ||
| 52 | 03:15 | And so when you see on the market these systems | ||
| 53 | 03:17 | that have just a few light emitting diodes on the side and are very low resolution, | ||
| 54 | 03:22 | it's nice that they exist because it still is better than nothing. | ||
| 55 | 03:26 | But it, in some sense, misses the point: | ||
| 56 | 03:28 | namely, that fingers are a very, very high-resolution input medium. | ||
| 57 | 03:34 | Now, what are some of the other advantages? | ||
| 58 | 03:36 | Well, the one advantage is that you don't have to pick them up, | ||
| 59 | 03:40 | and people don't realize how important that is -- | ||
| 60 | 03:44 | not having to pick up your fingers to use them. (Laughter) | ||
| 61 | 03:47 | When you think for a second of the mouse on Macintosh -- | ||
| 62 | 03:54 | and I will not criticize the mouse too much -- | ||
| 63 | 03:58 | when you're typing -- what you have -- you want to now put something -- | ||
| 64 | 04:02 | first of all, you've got to find the mouse. | ||
| 65 | 04:04 | You have to probably stop. Maybe not come to a grinding halt, | ||
| 66 | 04:09 | but you've got to sort of find that mouse. Then you find the mouse, | ||
| 67 | 04:12 | and you're going to have to wiggle it a little bit | ||
| 68 | 04:14 | to see where the cursor is on the screen. | ||
| 69 | 04:16 | And then when you finally see where it is, | ||
| 70 | 04:18 | then you've got to move it to get the cursor over there, | ||
| 71 | 04:20 | and then -- "Bang" -- you've got to hit a button or do whatever. | ||
| 72 | 04:23 | That's four separate steps versus typing and then touching | ||
| 73 | 04:26 | and typing and just doing it all in one motion -- | ||
| 74 | 04:31 | or one-and-a-half, depending on how you want to count. | ||
| 75 | 04:35 | Again, what I'm trying to do is just illustrate | ||
| 76 | 04:37 | the kinds of problems that I think face the designers | ||
| 77 | 04:41 | of new computer systems and entertainment systems | ||
| 78 | 04:44 | and educational systems | ||
| 79 | 04:47 | from the perspective of the quality of that interface. | ||
| 80 | 04:50 | And another advantage, of course, of using fingers is you have 10 of them. | ||
| 81 | 04:55 | And we have never known how to do this technically, | ||
| 82 | 04:58 | so this slide is a fake slide. | ||
| 83 | 05:00 | We never succeeded in using ten fingers, | ||
| 84 | 05:03 | but there are certain things you can do, obviously, | ||
| 85 | 05:06 | with more than one-finger input, which is rather fascinating. | ||
| 86 | 05:11 | What we did stumble across was something ... | ||
| 87 | 05:14 | Again, which is typical of the computer field, | ||
| 88 | 05:17 | is when you have a bug that you can't get rid of you turn it into a feature. | ||
| 89 | 05:22 | And maybe ... (Laughter) | ||
| 90 | 05:24 | maybe a mouse is a new kind of bug. | ||
| 91 | 05:28 | But the bug in our case was in touch-sensitive displays: | ||
| 92 | 05:32 | we wanted to be able to draw -- you know, rub your finger | ||
| 93 | 05:36 | across the screen to input continuous points -- | ||
| 94 | 05:39 | and there was just too much friction | ||
| 95 | 05:41 | created between your finger and the glass -- | ||
| 96 | 05:43 | if glass was the substrate, which it usually is. | ||
| 97 | 05:47 | So we found that that actually was a feature | ||
| 98 | 05:50 | in the sense you could build a pressure-sensitive display. | ||
| 99 | 05:53 | And when you touch it with your finger, | ||
| 100 | 05:55 | you can actually, then, introduce all the forces on the face of that screen, | ||
| 101 | 06:00 | and that actually has a certain amount of value. | ||
| 102 | 06:04 | Let me see if I can load another disc | ||
| 103 | 06:06 | and show you, quickly, an example. | ||
| 104 | 06:15 | Now, imagine a screen, which is not only touch-sensitive now, | ||
| 105 | 06:18 | it's pressure-sensitive. | ||
| 106 | 06:20 | And it's pressure-sensitive to the forces both in the plane of the screen -- | ||
| 107 | 06:24 | X, Y, and Z at least in one direction; | ||
| 108 | 06:26 | we couldn't figure out how to come in the other direction. | ||
| 109 | 06:30 | But let me get rid of the slide, | ||
| 110 | 06:34 | and let's see if this comes on. | ||
| 111 | 06:41 | OK. So there is the pressure-sensitive display in operation. | ||
| 112 | 06:45 | The person's just, if you will, pushing on the screen to make a curve. | ||
| 113 | 06:50 | But this is the interesting part. | ||
| 114 | 06:52 | I want to stop it for a second | ||
| 115 | 06:56 | because the movie is very badly made. | ||
| 116 | 07:00 | And the particular display was built about six years ago, | ||
| 117 | 07:03 | and when we moved from one room to another room, | ||
| 118 | 07:05 | a rather large person sat on it and it got destroyed. | ||
| 119 | 07:09 | So all we have is this record. (Laughter) | ||
| 120 | 07:12 | But imagine that screen having lots of objects on it | ||
| 121 | 07:20 | and the person has touched an object -- | ||
| 122 | 07:23 | one of N -- like he did there, and then pushed on it. | ||
| 123 | 07:28 | Now, imagine a program | ||
| 124 | 07:30 | where some of those objects are physically heavy and some are light: | ||
| 125 | 07:34 | one is an anvil on a fuzzy rug | ||
| 126 | 07:38 | and the other one is a ping-pong ball on a sheet of glass. | ||
| 127 | 07:42 | And when you touch it, you have to really push very hard | ||
| 128 | 07:46 | to move that anvil across the screen, | ||
| 129 | 07:48 | and yet you touch the ping-pong ball very lightly | ||
| 130 | 07:51 | and it just scoots across the screen. | ||
| 131 | 07:53 | And what you can do -- oops, I didn't mean to do that -- | ||
| 132 | 07:58 | what you can do is actually feed back to the user | ||
| 133 | 08:02 | the feeling of the physical properties. | ||
| 134 | 08:05 | So again, they don't have to be weight; | ||
| 135 | 08:08 | they could be a general trying to move troops, | ||
| 136 | 08:11 | and he's got to move an aircraft carrier versus a little boat. | ||
| 137 | 08:15 | In fact, they funded it for that very reason. | ||
| 138 | 08:18 | (Laughter) | ||
| 139 | 08:22 | The whole notion, then, is one that at the interface | ||
| 140 | 08:28 | there are physical properties in that transducer -- | ||
| 141 | 08:32 | in this case it's pressure and touches -- | ||
| 142 | 08:34 | that allow you to present things to the user that you could never present before. | ||
| 143 | 08:38 | So it's not simply looking at the quality or, if you will, the luxury of that interface, | ||
| 144 | 08:43 | but it's actually looking at the idea | ||
| 145 | 08:45 | of presenting things that previously couldn't be presented before. | ||
| 146 | 08:48 | I want to move on to another example, | ||
| 147 | 08:52 | which is one of a different sort, where we're trying to use computer | ||
| 148 | 08:58 | and video disc technology now to come up with a new kind of book. | ||
| 149 | 09:03 | Here, the idea is that you're going to take this book, | ||
| 150 | 09:08 | if you will, and it's going to come alive. | ||
| 151 | 09:10 | You're going to sort of breathe life into it. | ||
| 152 | 09:13 | We are so used to doing monologues. | ||
| 153 | 09:17 | Filmmakers, for example, are the experts in monologue making: | ||
| 154 | 09:21 | you make a film and it has a well-formed beginning, middle and end, | ||
| 155 | 09:24 | and in some sense the art of it is that. | ||
| 156 | 09:27 | And you then say, "There's an opportunity | ||
| 157 | 09:31 | for making conversational movies." Well, what does that mean? | ||
| 158 | 09:35 | And it sort of nibbles at the core of the whole profession | ||
| 159 | 09:41 | and all the assumptions of that medium. | ||
| 160 | 09:43 | So, book writing is the same thing. | ||
| 161 | 09:46 | What I'll show you very quickly is a new kind of book | ||
| 162 | 09:49 | where it is mixed now with ... all sorts of things live in there, | ||
| 163 | 09:53 | but you have to keep a few things in mind. | ||
| 164 | 09:56 | One is that this book knows about itself. | ||
| 165 | 10:01 | Each frame of the movie has information about itself. | ||
| 166 | 10:07 | So it knows, or at least there is computer-readable information | ||
| 167 | 10:12 | in the medium itself. It's just not a static movie frame. | ||
| 168 | 10:16 | That's one thing. The other is that you have to realize | ||
| 169 | 10:18 | that it is a random access medium, | ||
| 170 | 10:21 | and you can, in fact, branch and expand and elaborate and shrink. | ||
| 171 | 10:24 | And here -- again, my favorite example -- is the cookbook, | ||
| 172 | 10:28 | the "Larousse Gastronomique." | ||
| 173 | 10:31 | And I think I use the example all too often, | ||
| 174 | 10:34 | but it's a great one because there is a classic ending in that little | ||
| 175 | 10:39 | encyclopedia-style cookbook that tells you how to do something like penguin, | ||
| 176 | 10:46 | and you get to the end of the recipe and it says, "Cook until done." | ||
| 177 | 10:50 | Now, that would be, if you will, the top green track, | ||
| 178 | 10:55 | which doesn't mean too much. But you might have to elaborate for me | ||
| 179 | 10:59 | or for somebody who isn't an expert, and say, | ||
| 180 | 11:01 | "Cook at 380 degrees for 45 minutes." | ||
| 181 | 11:03 | And then for a real beginner, you would go down even further | ||
| 182 | 11:06 | and elaborate more -- say, "Open the oven, preheat, wait for the light to go out, | ||
| 183 | 11:10 | open the door, don't leave it open too long, | ||
| 184 | 11:13 | put the penguin in and shut the door ..." (Laughter) whatever. | ||
| 185 | 11:16 | And that's a much more elaborate one than you dribble back. | ||
| 186 | 11:19 | That's one kind of use of random access. | ||
| 187 | 11:24 | And the other is where you want to explain the same thing in different ways. | ||
| 188 | 11:32 | If you're in a classroom situation and somebody asks a question, | ||
| 189 | 11:36 | the last thing you do is repeat what you just said. | ||
| 190 | 11:39 | You try and think of a different way of saying the same thing, | ||
| 191 | 11:43 | or if you know the particular student and that student's cognitive style, | ||
| 192 | 11:48 | then you might say it in a way that you think | ||
| 193 | 11:50 | would have a good impedance match with that student. | ||
| 194 | 11:53 | There are all sorts of techniques you will use -- | ||
| 195 | 11:55 | and again, this is a different kind of branching. | ||
| 196 | 11:59 | So, what I will show you is ... it's a rather boring book, | ||
| 197 | 12:05 | but I'm afraid sometimes you have to do boring books | ||
| 198 | 12:08 | because your sponsors aren't necessarily interested in fiction | ||
| 199 | 12:13 | and entertainment. And this is a book on how to repair a transmission. | ||
| 200 | 12:19 | Now, I don't even know what vintage the transmission is, | ||
| 201 | 12:22 | but let me just show you very quickly some of it, and we'll move on. | ||
| 202 | 12:33 | (Video) Narrator: And continue to get descriptions for each of these chapters. | ||
| 203 | 12:36 | Nicholas Negroponte: Now, this is his table of contents. | ||
| 204 | 12:38 | Just a picture of the transmission, and as you rub your finger across the transmission | ||
| 205 | 12:42 | it highlights the various parts. | ||
| 206 | 12:45 | Narrator: When I find a chapter that I want to see, | ||
| 207 | 12:47 | I just touch the text and the system will format pages for me to read. | ||
| 208 | 12:59 | The words or phrases that are lit up in red are glossary words, | ||
| 209 | 13:05 | so I can get a different definition by just touching the word, | ||
| 210 | 13:08 | and the definition appears, superimposed over the illustration. | ||
| 211 | 13:33 | NN: This is about the oil pan, or the oil filter and all that. | ||
| 212 | 13:44 | This is relatively important because it sets the page ... | ||
| 213 | 13:48 | Narrator: This is another example of a page with glossary words | ||
| 214 | 13:53 | highlighted in red. | ||
| 215 | 13:57 | I can get a definition of these words just by touching them, | ||
| 216 | 14:00 | and the definition will appear in the illustration corner. | ||
| 217 | 14:08 | I can get back to the illustration, but in this case it's not a single frame, | ||
| 218 | 14:13 | but it's actually a movie of someone coming into the frame and doing the repair | ||
| 219 | 14:16 | that's described in the text. | ||
| 220 | 14:19 | The two-headed slider is a speed control that allows me to watch the movie | ||
| 221 | 14:23 | at various speeds, in forward or reverse. | ||
| 222 | 14:26 | And the movie is displayed as a full frame movie. | ||
| 223 | 14:31 | I can go back to the beginning ... and play the movie at full speed. | ||
| 224 | 14:49 | Here's another step-by-step procedure, only in this case -- | ||
| 225 | 14:51 | NN: Okay, this movie is ... Everybody's heard of sound-sync movies -- | ||
| 226 | 14:55 | this is text-sync movies, so as the movie plays, the text gets highlighted. | ||
| 227 | 15:00 | We highlight the text as we go through the movie. | ||
| 228 | 15:04 | Repairman: ... Not too far out. Front poles, preferably. | ||
| 229 | 15:08 | Don't loosen them too far. If you loosen them too far, you'll have a big mess. | ||
| 230 | 15:14 | NN: I suspect that some of you might not even understand that language. | ||
| 231 | 15:18 | (Laughter) | ||
| 232 | 15:23 | OK. I'm at the third and last part of this, | ||
| 233 | 15:28 | which I said I would make an attempt to at least give you some examples | ||
| 234 | 15:32 | that may be more directly related to the world of entertainment. | ||
| 235 | 15:36 | And of course, good education has got to be good entertainment, | ||
| 236 | 15:41 | so my first example will be drawn from a very recent experiment | ||
| 237 | 15:48 | that we've been doing -- in this case, in Senegal -- | ||
| 238 | 15:51 | where we have tried to use personal computers | ||
| 239 | 15:56 | as a pedagogical medium. But not as teaching machines at all; | ||
| 240 | 16:01 | the whole notion is to use this as an instrument | ||
| 241 | 16:05 | where there is a complete reversal of roles -- | ||
| 242 | 16:08 | the child is, if you will, the teacher and the machine is the student -- | ||
| 243 | 16:12 | and the art of computer programming is a vehicle that sort of | ||
| 244 | 16:14 | approximates thinking about thinking. | ||
| 245 | 16:17 | But teaching kids programming per se is utterly irrelevant. | ||
| 246 | 16:22 | And there are just a few slides I want to go through, | ||
| 247 | 16:25 | but there's a story I'd like to tell. And that was when, | ||
| 248 | 16:31 | before we did this in any developing countries -- | ||
| 249 | 16:33 | we're doing it, in fact, in three developing countries right now: | ||
| 250 | 16:35 | Pakistan, Colombia and Senegal -- | ||
| 251 | 16:37 | we did it in some pretty rough areas of New York City. | ||
| 252 | 16:42 | And one child, whose name I've forgotten, was about seven or eight years old, | ||
| 253 | 16:47 | absolutely considered mentally handicapped -- | ||
| 254 | 16:52 | couldn't read, didn't even make it in the lowest section of the school's classes -- | ||
| 255 | 17:00 | and was pretty much not in school, though physically there. | ||
| 256 | 17:03 | But did hang around the, quote, "computer room," | ||
| 257 | 17:06 | where there were quite a few computers, | ||
| 258 | 17:08 | and learned this particular language called Logo -- | ||
| 259 | 17:12 | and learned it with great ease and found it a lot of fun, | ||
| 260 | 17:15 | it was very interesting. And one day, by chance, | ||
| 261 | 17:20 | some visitors from the NIE came by in their double-breasted suits | ||
| 262 | 17:26 | looking at this setup, and none of the children who were normally there, | ||
| 263 | 17:31 | except for this one child, were there. | ||
| 264 | 17:35 | He was, and he said, "Let me show you how this works," | ||
| 265 | 17:38 | and they got an absolutely ingenuous, wonderful description of Logo. | ||
| 266 | 17:43 | And the child was just zipping right through it, showing them all sorts of things | ||
| 267 | 17:47 | until they asked him how to do something which he couldn't explain | ||
| 268 | 17:51 | and so he flipped through the manual, found the explanation | ||
| 269 | 17:54 | and typed the command and got it to do what they asked. | ||
| 270 | 17:56 | They were delighted, and by the time it was time to go see the principal, | ||
| 271 | 18:00 | whom they'd actually come to see -- not the computer room -- | ||
| 272 | 18:03 | they went upstairs and they said, | ||
| 273 | 18:04 | "This is absolutely remarkable! | ||
| 274 | 18:06 | That child was very articulate and showed us | ||
| 275 | 18:10 | and even dealt with the things he couldn't do automatically | ||
| 276 | 18:14 | with that manual. It was just absolutely fantastic." | ||
| 277 | 18:18 | The principal said, "There's a dreadful mistake, | ||
| 278 | 18:21 | because that child can't read. | ||
| 279 | 18:23 | And you obviously have been hoodwinked | ||
| 280 | 18:25 | or you've talked about somebody else." | ||
| 281 | 18:28 | And they all got up and they all went downstairs | ||
| 282 | 18:30 | and the child was still there. And they did something very intelligent: | ||
| 283 | 18:34 | they asked the child, "Can you read?" | ||
| 284 | 18:38 | And the child said, "No, I can't." | ||
| 285 | 18:41 | And then they said, "But wait a minute. You | ||
| 286 | 18:43 | just looked through that manual and you found ... " | ||
| 287 | 18:46 | and he said, "Oh, but that's not reading." | ||
| 288 | 18:49 | And so they said, "Well, what's reading then?" | ||
| 289 | 18:51 | He says, "Well, reading is this junk they give me in little books to read. | ||
| 290 | 18:55 | It's absolutely irrelevant, (Laughter) and I get nothing for it. | ||
| 291 | 19:02 | But here, with a little bit of effort I get a lot of return." | ||
| 292 | 19:06 | And it really meant something to the child. | ||
| 293 | 19:08 | The child read beautifully, it turned out, | ||
| 294 | 19:10 | and was really very competent. So it actually meant something. | ||
| 295 | 19:14 | And that story has many other anecdotes that are similar, | ||
| 296 | 19:19 | but wow. The key to the future of computers in education is right there, | ||
| 297 | 19:26 | and it is: when does it mean something to a child? | ||
| 298 | 19:29 | There is a myth, and it truly is a myth: | ||
| 299 | 19:32 | we believe -- and I'm sure a lot of you believe in this room -- | ||
| 300 | 19:35 | that it is harder to read and write than it is to learn how to speak. | ||
| 301 | 19:40 | And it's not, but we think speech -- "My God, little children pick it up somehow, | ||
| 302 | 19:46 | and by the age of two they're doing a mediocre job, | ||
| 303 | 19:48 | and by three and four they're speaking reasonably well. | ||
| 304 | 19:51 | And yet you've got to go to school to learn how to read, | ||
| 305 | 19:53 | and you have to sit in a classroom and somebody has to teach you. | ||
| 306 | 19:56 | Hence, it must be harder." Well, it's not harder. | ||
| 307 | 19:59 | What the truth is is that speaking has great value to a child; | ||
| 308 | 20:06 | the child can get a great deal by talking to you. | ||
| 309 | 20:09 | Reading and writing is utterly useless. | ||
| 310 | 20:11 | There is no reason for a child to read and write except blind faith, | ||
| 311 | 20:16 | and that it's going to help you. (Laughter) | ||
| 312 | 20:19 | So what happens is you go to school and people say, | ||
| 313 | 20:22 | "Just believe me, you're going to like it. | ||
| 314 | 20:25 | You're going to like reading," and just read and read. | ||
| 315 | 20:28 | On the other hand, you give a kid -- a three-year-old kid -- a computer | ||
| 316 | 20:32 | and they type a little command and -- Poof! -- something happens. | ||
| 317 | 20:35 | And all of a sudden ... You may not call that reading and writing, | ||
| 318 | 20:38 | but a certain bit of typing and reading stuff on the screen | ||
| 319 | 20:41 | has a huge payoff, and it's a lot of fun. | ||
| 320 | 20:44 | And in fact, it's a powerful educational instrument. | ||
| 321 | 20:48 | Well, in Senegal we found that this was the traditional classroom: | ||
| 322 | 20:53 | 120 kids -- three per desk -- one teacher, a little bit of chalk. | ||
| 323 | 20:58 | This student was one of our first students, | ||
| 324 | 21:01 | and it's the girl on the left leaning with her chalkboard, | ||
| 325 | 21:05 | and she came ... within two days -- | ||
| 326 | 21:08 | I want to show you the program she wrote, | ||
| 327 | 21:10 | and remember her hairstyle. And that is the program she made. | ||
| 328 | 21:16 | That's what meant something to her, is doing the hair pattern, | ||
| 329 | 21:20 | and actually did it within two days -- an hour each day -- | ||
| 330 | 21:25 | and found it was, to her, | ||
| 331 | 21:27 | absolutely the most meaningful piece ... | ||
| 332 | 21:30 | But rooted in that, little did she know how much knowledge | ||
| 333 | 21:34 | she was acquiring about geometry | ||
| 334 | 21:36 | and just math and logic and all the rest. | ||
| 335 | 21:39 | And again, I could talk for three hours about this subject. | ||
| 336 | 21:42 | I will come to my last example and then quit. | ||
| 337 | 21:50 | And my last example -- as some of my former colleagues, | ||
| 338 | 21:56 | whom I see in the room, can imagine what it will be. | ||
| 339 | 21:59 | Yes, it is. It's our work -- that was a while ago, | ||
| 340 | 22:02 | and it still is my favorite project -- of teleconferencing. | ||
| 341 | 22:06 | And the reason it remains a favorite project | ||
| 342 | 22:08 | is that we were asked to do a teleconferencing system | ||
| 343 | 22:15 | where you had the following situation: | ||
| 344 | 22:17 | you had five people at five different sites -- they were known people -- | ||
| 345 | 22:22 | and you had to have these people in teleconference, | ||
| 346 | 22:27 | such that each one was utterly convinced | ||
| 347 | 22:30 | that the other four were physically present. | ||
| 348 | 22:34 | Now, that is sufficiently | ||
| 349 | 22:38 | zany that we would, obviously, jump to the bait, and we did. | ||
| 350 | 22:43 | And the fact that we knew the people -- | ||
| 351 | 22:46 | we had to take a page out of the history of Walt Disney -- | ||
| 352 | 22:49 | we actually went so far as to build CRTs | ||
| 353 | 22:52 | in the shapes of the people's faces. | ||
| 354 | 22:55 | So if I wanted to call my friend Peter Sprague on the phone, | ||
| 355 | 23:00 | my secretary would get his head out and bring it and set it on the desk, | ||
| 356 | 23:03 | (Laughter) | ||
| 357 | 23:04 | and that would be the TV used for the occasion. | ||
| 358 | 23:09 | And it's uncanny: there's no way I can explain to you | ||
| 359 | 23:12 | the amount of eye contact you get with that physical face | ||
| 360 | 23:16 | projected on a 3D CRT of that sort. | ||
| 361 | 23:20 | The next thing that we had to do is to persuade them | ||
| 362 | 23:23 | that there needed to be spatial correspondence, which is straightforward, | ||
| 363 | 23:27 | but again, it's something that didn't fall naturally | ||
| 364 | 23:29 | out of a telecommunications or computing style of thinking; | ||
| 365 | 23:32 | it was a very, if you will, architectural or spatial concept. | ||
| 366 | 23:36 | And that was to recognize that when you sit around the table, | ||
| 367 | 23:39 | the actual location of the people becomes rather important. | ||
| 368 | 23:44 | And when somebody gets up, in fact, to go answer a phone | ||
| 369 | 23:47 | or use a bathroom or something, the empty seat becomes, | ||
| 370 | 23:50 | if you will, that person. And you point frequently to the empty seat | ||
| 371 | 23:53 | and you say, "He or she wouldn't agree," | ||
| 372 | 23:56 | and the empty chair is that person and the spatiality is crucial. | ||
| 373 | 24:02 | So we said, "Well, these will be on round tables | ||
| 374 | 24:05 | and the order around the table had to be the same, | ||
| 375 | 24:08 | so that at my site, I would be, if you will, real | ||
| 376 | 24:11 | and then at each other's site you'd have these plastic heads. | ||
| 377 | 24:16 | And the plastic heads, sometimes you want to project them. | ||
| 378 | 24:20 | And there are a number of schemes, which I don't want to dwell on, | ||
| 379 | 24:23 | but this is the one that we finally used | ||
| 380 | 24:25 | where we projected onto rear screen material | ||
| 381 | 24:29 | that was molded in the face -- literally in the face of the person. | ||
| 382 | 24:33 | And I'll show you one more slide, where this is actually made | ||
| 383 | 24:37 | from something called a solid photograph and is the screen. | ||
| 384 | 24:41 | Now, we track, on the person's head, the head motions -- | ||
| 385 | 24:44 | so we transmit with a video the head positions -- | ||
| 386 | 24:48 | and so this head moves in about two axes. | ||
| 387 | 24:55 | So if I, all of a sudden, turn to the person to my left | ||
| 388 | 25:00 | and start talking to that person, then at the person to my right's site, | ||
| 389 | 25:05 | he'll see these two plastic heads talking to each other. | ||
| 390 | 25:08 | And then if that person interrupts, then those two heads may turn. | ||
| 391 | 25:13 | And it really is reconstructing, quite accurately, teleconferencing. |