Zooming interface
Alan Kay
Alan.Kay at disney.com
Wed Feb 21 14:12:26 UTC 2001
The original interactive graphics system, Sketchpad by Ivan
Sutherland, had a zooming interface (yes, all the way back to 1962
for this idea). It had a graphics field that was about 1/3 of a mile
on a side on which you could put graphics and used continuous zoom
knobs to work with different levels of structure through its very
first clipping window.
Negroponte and Dick Bolt et.al. at the Architecture Machine Group at
MIT in the 70s put together one of the very first large color frame
buffers for a series of systems starting with Dataland (a zooming
interface on documents of various kinds), Spatial Data Management
System (a really great set of interface designs -- there are a number
of videos about this system), then Put That There (which tied this
interface, speech and gesture recognition together -- also lots of
videos). MIT Media Lab is the place to pound on. There might be
something on the net. Also MIT has been putting golden oldies to fax
docs on the net. I got a copy of Sutherland's thesis recently.
Vaughn Pratt of Stanford, also designed and showed a zooming
interface in the 70s.
I think there is a contemporary one called Pad++ that one can find on
the Internet, and they may have references to goodies from the past
(though people these days are quite careless about acknowledging
prior art -- partly from ignorance and partly from who knows just
what?)
Cheers,
Alan
-------
At 9:01 PM +1100 2/21/01, Karl Goiser wrote:
>G'Day,
>
>I have been wondering about this, so here are a couple of questions:
>
>1) Are there any references I can look at to find out more about the
>'Zooming Interface'?
>
>
>2) Is it anything like that "Project X" thingo Apple was experimenting with
>a while back?
>
>
>Thanks people!
>
>
>Karl
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