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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