In
our next presentation, we're going to take some risks and we're going to bring you forward.
We hope to extend our discussion and we hope to extend your imagination with a futuristic
time capsule that examines a day in the life of a university professor in the year 1995.
It might sound a little familiar to some of you.
And no, this is not the Knowledge Navigator 2, the final video.
Rather, it's an inside look at a typical day for a busy college instructor as he tries
to read his mail and keep abreast of the daily news events, do research, collaborate with
colleagues and create some inspiring materials for his students.
To guide us through this typical day, day in a life, we've asked Apple's Mike Leibhold,
senior scientist for Apple's Advanced Technology Group, to take us on this journey and explore
how some of the technologies that Dave Nagel outlined earlier this morning will apply,
will apply in the not too distant future.
Assisting Mike this morning will be Jean-Luc Lebrun, ATG's technical information manager.
So I'd like to fire up the time machine and see what future computing advances hold for
all of us.
So with that, Mike Leibhold.
Thank you very much, Jim.
It's really a pleasure to be here today.
I see many old friends in the audience.
A good part of my career at Apple has been spent working with the educational community.
Most recently, the last few years, I actually have been spending a fair amount of time working
on, directly on national information infrastructure issues.
And I'm delighted to tell you today is that Apple is going to play a major role in helping
some of these visions come forward.
The Apple Advanced Technology Group is not a product group.
We're a research laboratory.
We develop concepts.
We do projects.
And we hope that the things we're doing are going to manifest themselves in our future
products.
The national information infrastructure that Dave Nagel described this morning really has
three essential components.
High performance networks, a digital knowledge base of our intellectual heritage, and finally,
a skilled community of educators, scholars, and domain knowledge specialists.
Each of those areas, we in ATG are working to help empower people.
Now typically, in ATG, we work, consistent with Apple's philosophy of superb user interface,
we work on the premise of user-focused design.
We don't create technologies in a vacuum.
We try and start really from the first principle of trying to understand what people really
need.
So what we're going to do today is we're going to take a look at a symbolic 24-hour day in
the life of a professor, as Jim Buckley described.
So we have a clock, a rough schematic of a clock.
So we're going to kind of follow a professor through his day.
So we have arranged, through the magic of modern technology, to set up a direct link
with a world-renowned biophysicist, Professor Alex Asero, in the year 1997.
I hope everyone signed your level six non-disclosures, because this video conferencing system transcends
not just physical boundaries, but temporal boundaries as well.
Alex, are you there?
Hello.
Oh, good morning, Alex.
Hello, Mike.
How are you out there?
I'm doing fine.
Alex, we're here at the Apple Computer Higher Education Summit meeting in San Jose, California.
With your kind permission, we'd like to kind of follow you through your day's activities
and see how our technology really can be used and will be used to enhance the power of your
life.
Sure.
I mean, absolutely.
Is the picture good out there, or how's the transmission?
The picture is superb.
Because we're using the ATM technology, so that's why.
Hold on a second.
Hello?
Professor Asero speaking.
I'm sorry.
I won the Nobel Prize.
What do you mean?
I won the Nobel Prize?
Good grief.
Professor Lundquist?
Oh, thank you so much for the good news.
Yes, thank you, sir.
For my...
Yes, thank you.
Mike, I just won the Nobel Prize.
This is fantastic.
It's for my research on the common cold.
You won a Nobel Prize for the cure for the common cold?
I did.
Well, that's nothing to sneeze at.
No, it isn't.
Wow, what a day.
It's going to be a busy day for you.
I can see that.
Yeah, I know.
But if you want to see me through my day here, but I'll try and keep it as normal as I can.
And the first thing I usually do in the morning when I get up like this and have breakfast
with this beautiful pain au chocolat, can you see this?
That's French.
That's American.
I listen to my meds.
So if you don't mind, we're going to listen to see what's out there in my mail.
Let's see.
Casper, open my checkbook.
Oh, God.
I mean, I can see all these dollars coming my way.
Sorry, I'm confused here.
No.
Casper.
Casper, call my Macintosh.
Hello, this is Casper.
Who is calling?
He should know by now, would you think?
Casper, this is Alex Ossero.
Hello, Alex.
You have two new voice messages and three new mail messages.
You know, I'm expecting messages from my researchers because they're doing studies on transmissions
of cold and they're in France out there and they're studying a special manner of, you
know, which is more French than anything else because the Americans, I don't know, but I
know about the French.
You know, it's transmission of viruses by kissing.
So Casper, read my voicemail.
Voice message from Yanluo at 11.31 p.m. on Thursday, April 29, 1993.
Doctor, so far the 60-second kiss experiment has failed to demonstrate transmission of
the rhinovirus infection.
The volunteers want me to try 120 seconds now.
Go for it.
Casper, read the next message.
Voice message from Caroline Ossero at 4.44 p.m. on Tuesday, November 17, 1992.
Alex, Alex, I know that you're there.
This is your mother calling.
Don't forget to call your sister.
You know it's her birthday.
Yes, mom.
Casper, read next message.
Voicemail message from Ted Copielos at 11.39 a.m. on Wednesday, April 30, 1997.
That's my mail message.
I have been told that you have written the definitive article on the common cold.
Could I get a copy?
Thanks.
Sure.
Ted.
P.S. I also hear Hillary Clinton is mad at you.
Oh, really?
Casper, goodbye.
Goodbye, have a nice day.
Hillary's mad at me.
I'm wondering why.
I'm going to have a private conversation here.
Casper, stop listening.
You know, we've seen Professor Alex Ossero using the Casper technology.
I think you saw a brief demonstration of Casper's speech recognition yesterday or the day before.
In one of the discussions of our modern CPUs.
Today we can see Casper integrated in a compound document environment and integrated with the
mail system.
In the future, voice recognition is going to have a profound impact.
We think it's going to change the Macintosh interface from an intuitive interface to a
completely natural interface.
Oh, you're reading the news.
Yeah, it's my custom newspaper.
I get it every day.
My agents do this.
You did this way back in 1993, I believe, Apple Research.
Is that what you called it at the time?
That's right.
It was originally developed in Apple's Advanced Technology Group.
Yeah, Rosebud, Apple Search.
That's right.
So let me see here.
Casper, show me Canada Industrial Technology here.
I'd like to know what my French colleagues are doing.
What about the common cold, thank you.
Anticipation is the talent of Casper.
And a hot finger on the mouse, too.
Let's see.
Common cold.
Hillary gets a cold shoulder.
Let's look at, that's a preview of the article the agent retrieved here.
Let's have a look at that.
Professor Alcure, common cold.
Got a big financial problem.
You remember that in 19, she got the House and Senate to approve new taxes on pharmaceutical
products that were considered more or less ineffective.
Most cold-related remedies, so 400 percent.
Ooh, ooh.
And that brought in $4 million toward the new health care plan.
All right.
But I guess my research on the common cold and the cure here brought them in financial
trouble.
Okay, let's look at the other article, Casper.
Hot news, cold research.
Cold researchers.
Rumor has it that Professor Alex Ossero is being seriously looked at for the 1997 Nobel
Prize in Medicine.
Absolutely right.
Professor Ossero found a substance extracted from garlic that attaches to the most common
cold virus, type 3-D antiviral virus.
A substance triggers immediate reactions from the mucous membrane, a cell immune system
that stops the virus from coming any closer to the cell in a way the virus gets bad breath.
That's in the gist of my research, Mike.
It's very successful.
It's very optimistic.
Well, that's terrific, Alex.
So you're using artificial intelligence?
These are agents that are actually fetching the news for you.
Yes, they are.
I've given them my topics of interest and they basically retrieve my custom newspapers
of course they got the local gazette, you know, electronic, but I like my custom newspaper.
Listen, it's going to be a very busy day.
I have students' paper to grade.
I still have to prepare my lecture on air conditioning.
I've got to start working on images now for the press relations that is bound to come
and contact me.
Why don't you go ahead and we'll catch up with you a little bit later.
Thanks, thanks, thanks.
Great.
Well, Alex has already had an opportunity to exercise some of our technologies in some
dramatic new ways.
First we saw the speech recognition technology that really is only in its infancy today,
but by 1997 it should be an integral part of the computing and communications environment.
There are, however, several thresholds that we have to pass before we can really see speech
interface, speech interaction become a seamless part of the system.
Now Casper works.
The speech recognition system works today, but to be truly effective we're going to need
natural language knowledge recognition.
The system is going to have to understand idioms, slang, the change in the tone of your
voice, and actually have perhaps built in thesaurus and understand syntax in a much
more robust way.
I'm happy to report that in Apple ATG we really have got a very exciting and world class research
program going ahead in natural language recognition.
Another major threshold that has to be crossed for speech recognition to be truly effective
is the need for increased horsepower.
Now speech recognition works well today on today's FXs and quadriclass machines, but
to be truly effective it's going to take several orders of magnitude more power.
Now fortunately through our partnerships with IBM, Motorola, and others we are developing
basic CPU horsepower that is going to far surpass anything on the market, and we can
see radically improved performance in all of the computational devices that we're going
to see in the future.
So speech recognition is going to be inexpensive, easy, and effective by 1997.
We saw Alex using intelligent agents.
Intelligent agents are nothing more than a series of instructions to go offline and perform
some task or search for some particular information.
The notion of agents has been around for a long time.
I don't know if we have any librarians in the audience who are familiar with dialogue,
but years ago dialogue had a save search capability and an SDI capability, selective dissemination
of information.
It was possible even to get custom information profiles in the old days, but it was in the
hands of the high priesthood of knowledge specialists.
Today using tools like Rosebud, now called Apple Search, we have the ability to create
customized information retrieval vastly simplified.
So any instructor can search the vast libraries of data available on the internet and available
on the national information infrastructure in the future to very quickly select exactly
the right information in the right context to prepare a scholarly presentation with considerable
depth and focus.
This is one of the great promises of the national information network, national information
infrastructure, and we believe that our agent technology is going to greatly assist the
utilization of that vast amounts of data.
We've just got to be able to navigate through this enormous amounts of data.
And likewise, it's going to enable students to do more focused, effective research very,
very quickly and deliver more compelling and more exciting research reports.
We saw a video conference link.
Now today we had full motion NTSC video.
That kind of video conferencing is just not possible on today's ethernet.
Well it is possible if you put a switch in the center of the ethernet configuration and
give every user a direct connection, not a shared connection on the ethernet.
And even that is going to be expensive and is not going to really lead us forward into
the next generation of communications and computing.
So we need to develop some new communications technologies.
So I'm happy to tell you that Apple is very, very actively involved in research in something
called ATM, asynchronous transfer mode.
If you haven't heard the buzzword, I'm sure you're going to hear it from your communications
specialist on your staff in the very near future.
It's a technique that was originally developed in the telecommunications laboratories for
broadband ISDN, for very, very high bandwidth communications, 15 to 20 to 30 times faster
than today's ethernet.
So there is a standards committee at the ATM forum.
Apple is one of the original founders and we are working very, very heavily with the
standards community to see that this high powered metropolitan area network technology
is going to be available at the earliest possible dates for academic networking and communications.
So we can have high performance, real time connection between professors and their colleagues,
between researchers, between students and professors, and ultimately to video servers
that can have courseware and lectures online, integrated multimedia services.
The ATM protocol suite and the ATM technology we believe is going to form the bedrock foundation
for the new internet.
Now today's internet, based on the TCPIP suite, is certainly adequate for today's needs for
just text file transfer, email, remote logins.
But one single user opening a video section can saturate major portions of the internet
backbone.
So the internet engineering task force recognizing this has formed several groups to create new
audio visual protocol suites to really increase the potential of today's internet.
Apple is again very involved with the IETF, the internet engineering task force, to see
that the new extensions to the internet are going to support the kind of high bandwidth
interactive multimedia communications we see in the future.
Now we've been through the breakfast session here with Professor Alex Acero.
I think maybe we can take a look and see the next portion of the day really is a day when
most people are preparing work, preparing their documents, studying.
So why don't we visit with Alex and see how his work day is shaping up.
Alex?
Hello, Alex, are you there?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm trying to plan out what I'm going to do to retrieve all this information that I need
here for the press briefing.
The university press relation officer, of course, is already on my case.
And I've got a lot to do here, but probably retrieve digital images.
What do you do to retrieve images back in 1993, Mike?
Well, we've just kind of crossed the threshold now to make very high quality digital images
accessible as part of the computing environment.
Oh, okay.
We've been working with Kodak.
Oh, you're not using these old camera games, are you?
Well, no, no.
We've got some new digital technology.
And we've worked with the Kodak Image Communications Group on something called PhotoCV.
I don't know how many of you have seen these little golden compact disks.
Yeah, my grandma's got one.
We'll find out what Alex uses later on, for sure.
You will.
PhotoCV is a pretty exciting technology.
Kodak has put a digital capability in photo processing labs across the United States and
perhaps in many places in the world that will take your 35 millimeter transparencies and
digitize them and put them on a compact disk.
A full resolution, full photographic resolution is encoded on the disk, but yet there are
other layers of resolution also encoded on the disk.
So you can put the compact disk in a standard Macintosh CD-ROM drive and bring up an image
that is exactly scaled for the display on the Macintosh.
So it's a scalable imaging system.
Now we've been working with Kodak and we've developed an application for management of
images.
It's called Shoebox and I'm going to have to boot it up here.
Excuse me for one minute.
Oh, sorry to disturb your sleep.
That's no problem.
Now I don't know if you can see this, but the Shoebox program creates a very small file,
only 116K, that gives us a visual interface to much larger files.
Several megabytes of data can be shown here.
So we can browse through these and just by simply clicking on the palette.
Yeah, you probably have to load the folder and mention it's the right files.
I just did that.
It works beautifully.
So we get a little visual preview of a QuickTime movie and if we push the play button on the
QuickTime window, we should be able to see some animated ants up there.
Oh, isn't that cute?
That's right, it worked.
So we have a visual interface for lots of movies.
We can also load PIC files, now these black and white PIC files are loaded, or where?
In the Shoebox folder, images.
So we've extended the Macintosh interface to the cataloging and management of a wide
variety of images.
These PIC images, QuickTime images, in fact we can even scroll through and take a look
and see if there are, well we can load a full image right off the hard disk.
Not enough memory.
Is that a 128K Mac?
This is a 128K Mac Plus, you mean this won't work?
Not sure, they're not very difficult to find these days.
Well we can see there's a good market for memory.
The future of memory is going to be absolutely free.
They found memory mines in South Africa.
Absolutely right.
We have some other really interesting techniques as part of this program.
We have a search technique so you can create Boolean queries and search for images.
So I can either search for them or I can just type in ME and I should get Mexico City.
And I really doubt this one's going to come up because I don't think Mexico is a smaller
display than Chicago, but we'll see.
It probably doesn't have enough memory to display Mexico either.
Oh here it is, there is Mexico City.
Oh it's beautiful.
It brought it up in the catalog window.
Now there's not enough memory to show the whole thing here.
But pretty neat, pretty neat.
You know what, why don't I show you what I use?
What do you use?
When memory is free.
Well memory is a very common place, you know, it's just sand anyway.
Or brain cells.
I'm actually, I've logged on to my French research center here.
That's why you see all this, you see my screen there, Mike?
Yeah, beautiful.
You see Imaget, do you know what that means?
Images?
No, Imaget, small image.
Oh, small image.
Vignettes, you would call it vignettes.
And so I still am lumbered with this Boolean thing, but I'm not for much longer I must
say.
And this is, I mean I wish my researchers, you know, I've got this girl out there, she's
really nice, she's a very good researcher, but she keeps putting her own collection of
images on the research file server.
So I know actually, I know why the, you know who that is, this one here?
Maybe double click on it here.
You know who that is?
No.
Princess Stephanie of Monaco, you see the caption down there?
It's in 1907, it's her fifth child.
Because actually she doesn't have much revenue, but each time that she gives the right to
a photographer to take such a picture in such a posture with such a new baby, she gets half
a million dollars.
So that's her fifth child now.
So let me see here, let's go back to, I actually want to find my photo and viruses.
Let's see what the last ones they have.
That's pretty good.
You know, Mike, we're actually going to France here and retrieving these images using the
digital network, still ATM actually.
Now these are pictures of the rhinovirus done by my research lab here.
We work in collaboration with Purdue University, they're really top researchers out there on
the common cold.
Look at this, isn't that lovely?
Look at the geometry of that virus, you know, Mike.
Look at the little canyons there and the, and it's just, isn't it, isn't nature wonderful?
Only a specialist can truly appreciate the subtleties of the magnificence of this picture.
Yes.
Look at this, look at this, the beauty of this virus, Mike, look, look.
Through this, this electron scanners that we've got and the, it's just x-ray crystallography.
It's just, this is it.
This is the common cold.
So, and that's what you, you attach that radical, you know, to the virus that makes it kind
of ill smelling to the cells.
So that, that's it.
That's, that's the very one.
So I'm going to transmit this image here directly from France and I'm going to ask for,
Voulez-vous transmettre les images maintenant?
Oui.
And you are all the way from France and on my machine now and actually I'm going to take
this one as well here.
Voila.
Et voila.
So the beauty of the networks here.
So I'm, this, I can't believe this.
On the first row, Mike.
Yes, yes.
Is that Hans Stunden on the first row there?
Yeah, I think it is.
Professor Hans Stunden?
Yeah, there.
Professor Hans Stunden?
Yes.
Professor, what a pleasure.
I mean, this is unexpected.
You know, Professor, you're going to be very successful three years from now.
I shouldn't have said that, right?
You're going to be a very, in fact, if I could possibly get your picture, Mike, can you use
that technology that you've got there, the camera and get her picture for me?
This one?
This camera?
Yeah, the Kodak camera.
Yes, the Kodak camera.
Sure.
Yep.
It's a personal digital assistant that we've been developing with Kodak.
Kind of bulky, isn't it?
It's very heavy, yes.
I don't want to drop it.
I'm going to go ahead and take a picture.
Okay.
Got it.
Thank you so much.
And it would have been delightful to see you, but more on that later.
Okay.
What have you got to do to transmit it?
Well, this camera has a SCSI interface, S-C-S-I.
SCSI?
It's an old swear word.
Oh.
I'm not familiar with it.
Fortunately, it's been terminated by your time.
It's not one of these things where you have to push things to have numbers on it, right?
There's a little connector on the camera, and my goodness, this is an awfully heavy
box here.
No, no, no.
I tell you, no.
Mike, thank you so much.
Don't bother about it.
Anne, it was great seeing you, and it's too bad.
Listen, listen, listen.
Why don't I show you what we do today with this camera technology?
I mean, for example, could you have annotated that digital picture you just took?
No, no.
Only if I took a hard copy print and pasted it on a piece of paper and then took a ballpoint
pen.
No, no, no.
Let me show you a video here.
Let me get my video cards.
American Express.
I hate it when I mix my American Express cards with my video cards.
Here.
On this video, there's a student that did this actually to explain to the other people
what this new technology was.
Why don't you look at this?
It's called PhotoLogger here, and I'm going to play it for you on my digital player here,
if you don't mind.
Please, we'd be delighted to see that.
Okay, here we go.
Right now, we're looking down on the camera, and what you see here is a display, and basically
that's where the pictures are going to show up, and it also has a touch screen, and I
can write on top of this with a pen or a stylus.
This button here is the button that you press when you want to take a picture.
This is a viewfinder, and I would actually turn the camera and look into that to see
pictures through the viewfinder.
The buttons on the left-hand side here are used as layering devices, and I'll show you
that as we walk through the scenario.
So the first thing that I do is turn on my camera, and inside my camera are some of the
pictures that I've taken of Lake Suwa and other places that I've visited in Japan.
In order to move around and look at different pictures, I just simply flip the page with
my hand.
If I want to go back to Lake Suwa, I flip the other way.
Let's go back and look at these men.
These were some people that I met in Japan, and I knew that I might forget their names,
so at the time I took a little post-it or reminder to myself of who these people were.
So in order to see that annotation, I have a little layer here called the annotation
layer.
I click on this, and when I do, I get a tag that represents the kind of annotation that
I took.
Basically what this function did was say to the computer, for the next 10 seconds, remember
everything that I do, including writing on top of the display and talking to the camera.
What I can do now is play this back and see a little movie of the annotation that I made.
So I'll click on this.
These are our hosts from St. Glepsin, Mr. Masuda-san and Mr. Osawa-san.
This is the movie of the annotation that I had made.
Now what I can do is move through the pictures in this book a little quicker by flicking
quickly across the page.
When I see a picture I want, I press down and stop the pages from flipping, and maybe
I missed it by one, so I might want to back up.
Now this is a picture of something that I might not remember what it is when I get home.
So I can pull out my stylus and actually write onto the display.
So I'll take, let's imagine I have a pen in my hand now, and I can write here, this
is a flex circuit, and it can be bent here, and I'll draw a little arrow to where it can
be bent.
Let's say I make a mistake.
Well, in the system that we're thinking of, you might actually take the pen, flip it over,
and erase the mistake.
A very natural kind of thing to do.
And then I might flip it back over and draw a new arrow over here.
The reason that's important is it's a new kind of technology to know the difference
between actually using your finger to flip pages and using a pen to write on top of the
surface.
Now there are times when I'm using my camera when I want to sort of push back and see several
pictures at one time.
So what I can do here is sort of push into the center of the screen and get an overview
of all the pictures that I have in my camera.
And you see the screen is flashing here because this is where I came from.
Now Apple is not committed yet to announcing that we're going to make cameras, but we certainly
have considerable understanding in our laboratories of how cameras may be used.
We've been particularly thinking about uses of digital cameras in an academic environment.
A small digital camera that can be easily annotated would have tremendous impact in
a whole variety of field research activities.
Botanists, sociologists, geologists, meteorologists, just the applications for field research and
for field studies are really too innumerable to mention, but we feel it's really vast.
Now a digital camera is only one of a number of scalable PDAs, personal digital assistants,
that we're considering.
You know, if we look at the future, the convergence of information systems, imaging, computing,
television, telecommunications, we can see that the barriers and the distinctions between
device categories is going to blur.
So we're going to have new combinations of device functionality, hybrid devices, devices
that have part communications function, part imaging function, devices that have computational
power but the ability to communicate across the network.
So we're going to see the creation of not just hybrid device functionality but hybrid
applications and hybrid technologies.
The applications will scale.
So we're learning a lot about not only the kinds of devices that will connect into the
systems but how to render knowledge so that it will work on a low capacity handheld device
to a higher capacity desktop device.
By the way, while Professor Alex was talking, I checked and I saw that we did indeed have
adequate memory.
It hadn't been allocated.
I did allocate the correct memory for the display.
I wanted to point that out because the Kodak Photo CD is one of the first commercial instances
of scalable data representation.
And the files that we saw were actually quite small files, but they can be rendered in a
very, very large format.
The scalable video is another example.
We have research going on in advanced technology to understand how video can be rendered in
various spatial resolutions or temporal resolutions, the number of frames over time, so that we
can render video on small, low capacity handheld devices or large wall size displays.
How we can deliver full motion, full rate video over high bandwidth networks or how
we can subsample video and run it over low bandwidth networks.
Now, it's very interesting.
The image browser that Professor Acero demonstrated in French was created by a group in Paris,
France using ISDN, Integrated Services Digital Network.
It's a rather low bit rate technology.
It's 144 kilobit technology that was developed as an international standard.
It has never really found much application in the US, but in France they've really been
doing quite a bit with ISDN, and there are some 30 different developers in France alone
that have developed a whole suite of communications applications using ISDN.
So if ISDN becomes an important part of the national information infrastructure in the
US, we already have a full suite of multimedia applications that we're going to be able
to use, I think quite effectively, in academic and research environments.
We also saw a couple of programs for managing new data types.
The Macintosh user interface with its iconic display of files was a major step forward.
You can select large icons, small icons, you can color them, you can create new icons.
You can then do text lists and view by date, by size, by kind of the files.
They now have a command F find feature built into the Macintosh that will allow you to
find a file, but the whole metaphor and the whole capability needs to be extended to handle
new media types.
So you've seen at earlier demonstrations some of the new kinds of image browsers that we're
using for QuickTime, and now you can see that working with partners like Kodak, we have
new browsing capabilities for full motion images.
Now, excuse me, full resolution still images.
These images will be coming off of a new class of file servers and media servers, and these
are some things that we've been working on.
We'll talk a little bit more about those a little bit later.
Now I can see that the clock is ticking away here.
It's getting towards lunchtime.
I think it's hard to imagine how technology can be used to improve the quality of lunch,
but I'm happy to report that there actually has been some work in ATG.
Now this is indeed a very, very secret development.
This is one of the first times that anyone outside of a select handful of people in ATG
have seen this technology, so I'd ask you please abide by your nondisclosures.
Everyone sign nondisclosures here?
Can I see a show of hands?
Well there's quite a few.
I think about 80% of the audience has signed nondisclosures.
Those of you who have not signed nondisclosures, could you cover your eyes please?
Why don't we take a look at some technology that was being developed to enhance the quality
of the lunch experience?
Nestled deep in Apple's R&D mecha is an elite group of thinkers.
What you're about to see is a first and may only be revealed to non-Apple employees under
the strictest of nondisclosure agreements.
Look, I'm frustrated with today's CPUs.
I need the next generation of technology and I need it now.
A lot of critics said, can't be done.
A lot of the people said, nah, it's impossible.
Well we've been working on the applications of Star Trek transporter technology here at
Apple for a long time and we finally made the breakthrough.
Imagine you're working away and you decide, I'm hungry for a pizza right now.
By simply clicking the icon, a complex digital stream of commands is sent to the powerful
Foodulator 2000 mainframe.
This powerful translator gives any standard fax machine full digital pizza capabilities
at 9600 calories per minute.
Apple the power to eat your best.
Alex, Alex, what are you having for lunch?
A pizza.
You see what I'm doing here?
What is that?
Garlic.
I don't like your toppings.
I like the good old juice of garlic on pizza.
It's just beautiful.
Thank goodness this is not Smell-O-Vision.
You know what, garlic is in French.
You know the name for garlic in French?
No, no, what is it?
So when someone eats a lot of garlic in France and you get near them, you say, aye, aye, aye.
Oh, this is just delicious.
Doesn't that pizza get in the way of your work, Alex?
You've got a skid-resistant keyboard there, I guess.
Yeah, I've got to grade a student's paper.
You know, you've seen the virus, right, Mike?
Yeah.
You see how important it is to understand molecular biology, to be able to model.
So 3D rendering, 3D altogether is something very important.
And of course, all my students have to do work on 3D.
And all your students do work on 3D as well, right, Mike?
Yeah.
On their cheap workstations, computers?
Well to do 3D modeling, it costs up to $40,000, $50,000 to do it.
What?
Oh, come on.
No, no, no, no.
Here all our students are able to have this 3D capability basically on their portable
machines that they carry with them so they can actually work in 3D.
And it's just commonplace.
It's part of the computer scenery, if you want.
So let me see what this student has done here.
Brand X, okay.
Uh-huh.
Oh, nice.
Okay, so he's done a, notice the cursor, 3D cursor.
Notice the shadow of the 3D cursor here on the screen moving in real time.
2D cursor.
Okay, that's kind of nice.
Okay, let's see here.
Oh, okay.
Oh, and you go through an object, you come back, you go back.
That's neat.
Okay, good interface here.
You grab an object.
Good.
Okay.
Yeah, he's added a little bit of gravity.
Oh, good.
Did you notice I did the connection here to the 2D world?
Kind of, I think you called it publish and subscribe in a way.
So that's, what's this?
Ah, great.
I asked him to do a virtual sphere metaphor.
You know, it's like a glass ball.
So with a normal mouse, you can actually rotate and look at the object.
But here, this is good, excellent work.
Good, good, good.
And I can bring it forward.
And the shadows also change.
Yes, good work.
Good work.
Notice when you move from 2D to 3D, you really get the document.
Also includes 3D data, not just text.
And what kind of mouse do you use?
Oh, he uses this mouse here, which is a three-dimensional mouse.
Good.
Good work.
So, okay, I'll finish grading this.
Well, that's really terrific, Alex.
Much of the technology that you're showing here is actually being developed right now
in the advanced technology laboratories.
We've been developing very low-cost hardware for doing the kind of 3D rendering you see
here.
The 3D graphics, we believe, is going to be important for many, many reasons.
One of the most profound developments in computer science in the last few years has been the
development of knowledge visualization.
It's given scholars from many domains the ability to represent very abstract ideas in
a very concrete way.
But so far, the high-powered visualization tools have really only been in the hands of
people who have access to supercomputers or desktop graphic machines of a tens-of-thousand-dollar
variety.
The hardware we're working on, the chips we've been working on in ATG, are going to be inexpensive
enough to incorporate in a low-cost power book, low-cost desk station, and ultimately,
even PDAs themselves will have high-capacity interactive graphic capabilities so that we
can see that these visualizations will be in the hands of students and scholars across
the academic realm.
Eventually, they'll be in the hands of perhaps even children who are playing interactive
games.
The other really major element that we saw here, or actually two additional elements
in this little demonstration that are extraordinarily important, one is new direct manipulation
techniques, user interface modalities for managing three-dimensional objects.
The three-dimensional cursor, some new mice, these are only a couple of samples of quite
a significant amount of work we're doing in ATG to enable people to, again, have a natural
relationship with the computational digital representation, a natural interface, a direct
manipulation of 3D objects.
Alex?
Yeah?
How's your pizza?
I can't finish it.
Got too much.
I'm working now on my simulation tool here.
Air conditioning is a key to the spreading of viruses, and so I'm asking my students
as well to learn about air conditioning systems, cleaning, hygiene, whatever.
Will your technology work with computer viruses?
Yes, wireless viruses.
Great.
Because in fact, in 1997, wireless viruses are the new thing.
If you don't have your wireless virus, you're a nobody.
So let's see here.
I'm selecting this system here, and I'm going to go say, let's see, hot, and I'm going to
select this valve here, and I'm going to say open.
Okay, this seems to be working fine.
As you can see, these pipes are not just normal pipe.
They're actually intelligent pipes.
They know their behavior.
They know what's their methods, messages, things like that.
So it's object-based.
It's quite sophisticated here, simulation in the development environment.
This is really a spectacular application.
This must have taken you several months to build this whole application.
What, this thing here?
No, no, no.
About 20 minutes here.
20 minutes?
Yeah.
Let me show you.
I'm going to take a component here.
That's the system here.
I'm going to bring in a little pipe.
There we go.
And I'm going to bring a valve.
There you are.
And I can then continue bringing elements here like this pipe, like maybe this corner,
and so on, and so on.
So at this stage, same principle really applies.
I can actually select the subject here, and basically once the subject is selected, say,
okay, I want it cold this time, and I want to open the valve.
And you notice how easy that was to create this.
That's terrific.
Yeah.
It's really beautiful, object-oriented, completely object-based development environment.
Simulations are so easy to do.
And it's very rich.
You can see this little guy there with the little spanner.
That's my little agent that troubleshoots the system.
It's quite neat.
Quite neat.
Well, thank you, Alex.
Perhaps we will join you in a little bit.
Yes.
Thank you.
We've seen here an application developed with an extremely powerful new authoring language,
scripting environment, and programming environment.
It's a radical new development.
We believe it's one of the most powerful pieces of software we've ever developed in the advanced
technology labs.
It's going to enable novice users to create very complex simulations, simulations that
have behaviors, procedures, and actually are knowledge-based.
This language environment is really going to allow a variety of users to create a rich
set of simulations.
Now, we know that increasingly simulations are going to be important, because as budgets
are constrained, rich laboratory environments are going to be harder and harder to create.
And plus, there are some phenomena that can only be studied in simulation.
Some phenomena are too large, galaxies, too small, subatomic particles, or too slow.
It may take eons for some phenomena, or too fast, nanoseconds, or perhaps too dangerous,
explosive elements.
All kinds of things like this can be economically, effectively, safely, and clearly modeled on
a computer display using a combination of the scripting and development environments
we just saw and some of the beautiful new three-dimensional tools that we saw developed.
By the way, I wanted to mention in the demonstration of the three-dimensional graphics, there were
a lot of different data types set into the page display, into the page document.
Until now, in the Macintosh environment, the application has been the center of the universe
with documents as being satellites to the application.
We're working on new document architectures to reverse that so that the document is the
center and so that many applications can be used to add data elements so that we can have
rich interprocess communication and messaging between applications of various types in one
document display.
As we look at the life of our professor, Alex Acero, we can see that it's now approaching
the evening hours.
In the evening hours, people typically, people who don't necessarily have a lot of work to
do, have their limited discretionary time in the evening.
In the mid to late 1990s, we're going to see a dramatic increase in new technologies, increasing
for people's attention, not to mention their available discretionary dollars.
We've got compact discs with audio now.
We've got compact discs with digital data, CD-ROM.
We have compact discs with photographic pictures now, photo with CD.
We're going to have, in the next year or two, we'll see quite commonplace full motion, full
screen video on compact discs.
If you've been reading the newspapers lately, it's hard to miss the stories about new advanced
cable systems with 500 digital channels, using by the way, the same digital compression techniques
essentially that are going to be used for putting video on compact discs.
This fall, Hughes Corporation and NBC are launching a satellite called Direct TV that
will give a $700 18-inch receiver the capability of receiving directly 150 channels, no more
10-foot satellite roof stations.
The telephone companies, the research labs at Bell Communications Research and elsewhere
have developed techniques to deliver full motion video over today's copper wires without
fiber optics.
It's a technique called ADSL, asymmetric digital subscriber loop.
There is indeed going to be an increasing competition for the time and attention of
consumers in the 1990s.
In fact, all these new technologies are really going to dramatically change the way we entertain
ourselves.
This is not to say that books are going to go away or VHA tapes or conversation, but
the electronic experience is going to change dramatically, even the way we listen to music.
Now today, we get our music off of CDs.
I wonder how they do it in the 1990s.
Alex, are you there?
Yes.
That's the life.
That's the part of the day I like best, sampling my delicious Chateau Plonk.
1993, good year.
And cheers.
I've had a hectic day, all the public relations, and I'm ready for my yes, and my garlic.
Alex, we were talking about some of the new technologies that are going to be available
in your time.
We were saying that it even changes the way we may be listening to our music.
Oh, absolutely.
Do you still get your music off a compact disc?
Oh, no.
Well, only if you want to.
I mean, it's still there because it was such a popular, it's like vinyl way back in 1978.
So you can still keep your...
No, right now, I mean, the way I do this is I buy my records, I listen to samples of them,
and I buy my records over the wire.
So over the network, basically, from your home, you can buy your own records.
And then enjoy them.
Let's see here.
Can you see my jukebox?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's my electronic jukebox.
There's a file server.
Many people can actually tap into the file server and listen to their records.
Like...
Wow.
This is great.
I mean, I like to relax.
Or you can also...
Let's see if you like this kind of music here.
Kind of relaxing, you know, to go to sleep in the evenings.
Really great, really great.
But back in your days, my son was listening to this kind of stuff here.
So...
With this, I leave you, Mike.
I've had a pretty full day, and I'll see you another time.
Good night, Alex, and congratulations once again.
Oh, thank you.
It was such a big day.
Thank you.
Let's hear it for Professor Alex Acero.
We have seen a media server here in action.
This was actually an ordinary Macintosh hard disk connected over ordinary Apple Talk.
We have some engineers, Rod Perkins in our advanced technology lab, has created a new
modification of the Apple Talk protocol to allow streaming files.
Now most of the communications we do over our local area networks are asynchronous file
transfers.
The timing is not as important.
If it's a split second or a couple of seconds late, we don't really notice it.
But with music and video, synchronization and on-time delivery is absolutely essential.
So the technique that Alex demonstrated here runs on a typical server.
Twelve users can access that jukebox simultaneously on different points of the network.
The same media server technology that was demonstrated with audio obviously extends
and supports the idea of other kinds of streaming files.
Full motion video, interactive animation.
So in the future we will see on campus courseware servers.
Some of the great lectures may be stored for posterity so people can go back and review
a really terrific lecture.
Interactive simulations can be put online all with real-time interactive performance.
So the combination of these high performance disk drives and the new ATM high performance
networks and the extensions to the TCPIP network are going to allow many of the benefits of
the national information infrastructure to be manifested in a reasonably predictable
future.
Today we saw quite a few of the technologies that are going to really help the NII come
into being.
We saw speech recognition systems, systems that allow the user interface to be transformed
to a more national conversational mode.
We saw in the first demonstration, I didn't mention it at the time, but we saw an example
of new mail handling capabilities.
Apple product development has developed something called AOC, Apple Open Collaborative Environment.
It's an environment that allows many mail systems to be integrated into one common mailbox
so that you can have internet mail, Apple link, MCI mail, CompuServe, and even voicemail
integrated into one mailbox.
Now using some of the caller ID features of some of the new telecommunications protocols,
we can have a graphical user interface for voicemail.
We've seen compound documents, documents and new kinds of architecture allowing the applications
to be subservient to the document itself rather than the other way around, giving us a richer
variety of ways to deal with documents.
We've seen new direct manipulation of computer graphics.
We've seen new intelligence scripting environments that are going to allow a richer variety of
users to create new kinds of simulations for new kinds of scientific phenomena.
We've seen new ways of handling images and other kinds of multimedia.
I probably missed a couple, but in general I think you'll see that we in ATG are really
trying to transform the way people do things to enable people to do the things they do
better and to do the things they can only imagine.
Thank you.
I think we may have time for a little question and answers, but I'd like to introduce my
colleague Jean-Luc Le Brun, Professor Alex Acero.
Are you there?
Here he is.
Hi.
So nice to see you.
Oh, that garlic.
It is indeed the cure for the common cold.
It keeps people away from you.
Aye, aye, aye.
We have time for a couple of questions.
Can we answer any questions about our work in ATG?
Clearly.
It's my garlic.
It is late in the day and I think people are probably checking their schedules.
We hope that you've enjoyed our portion of the Higher Education Summit.
Yes.
Can you give us some idea on the timeline for integration of speech recognition including
natural language courses in the five years or 20 years away?
We have speech recognition now running on today's generation of Macintosh products.
Yes.
There's two notions here.
One is recognition.
If I speak French, you're able to recognize what I say, but what does it mean?
And there's understanding.
So the understanding part, what we have today in the way of technology is superficial understanding.
We do some sentence parsing.
There's more intelligence that it's not just word looking, spotting, thank God.
So there's a, but it's still shallow.
And as you know, the CYC project that attempts to try and have the computer just have common
sense is a multimillion dollar project and they're still basically grappling with the
issue.
So natural language understanding and a little bit of intelligence.
We have some key researchers working on that topic in our group, but it's not, I cannot
give you a timeline.
We're probably going to work on it even in the next century.
It's a big, big problem.
Yes.
Suppose it's 1997 and you're giving a lecture in Paris and you want to transmit it in San
Francisco.
How would that be done?
Well, there's several media that I think are going to be used.
First off, we hope that the broadband fiber optics are going to be affordable for academic
use.
There are a couple of barriers though, and they're not just technical barriers.
They are barriers, they're business barriers and regulatory barriers.
A live video conference like this can take anywhere from five megabits to 50 megabits
of data transmission.
That right now under today's tariffs for telecommunications is prohibitively expensive.
Now if the telecommunications system somehow can take a radical step forward and price
video and media conferencing at the same rate that voice conferencing and low bit rate communications
are today, then we will be able to do that easily.
We have some very difficult economic problems to work through.
Simply economics, not technology.
The technology is there for doing an ATM, asynchronous transfer mode, virtual circuit
between Paris and California.
Likewise, we can see a variety of new kinds of satellite techniques are very promising
as well.
I believe that most of these kinds of communications are going to be over fiber optic links.
In 1993 and we'll go back to 1997, you spent a lot of money on picture film.
I don't want to talk about generic brand names.
Well sure, the low bit rate video compression techniques for 56 to 64 kilobits, the price
on those kinds of technologies is dropping dramatically.
We believe that the quality of experience is going to be okay at those bit rates.
We have kind of a joke in ATG, we call it Jell-O-Vision.
We use it frequently for collaborating with our Cambridge, Massachusetts laboratory and
with other locations in the country.
It certainly works and it certainly beats the price of a plane ticket for many kinds
of collaborations.
So that should be reasonable and it's reasonable to assume that the cost of the communications
link might be reasonable by 1997.
There's a lot of experiments being done today as well on just video over twisted pairs and
things like that, normal telephone wires.
And the question also is will it be digital or will it be analog at that time in 1997.
So I think the whole issue is also that of digital television and the FCC work and things
like that.
So there's a lot of things that we cannot, that are not of our only reason.
As you look out and work toward this future, presumably you're hoping for a future that
is entirely homogeneous around whatever Macintoshes are then.
But I wonder to what extent your work is actually planning for the opposite, which is integration
across all sorts of different environments.
We are absolutely assuming heterogeneous environments.
There's a proliferation of device types.
The networks have got to be neutral and in fact we are working widely in standards communities
to assure the greatest data exchange and operation exchange across platforms.
And I think our particular value in working in a standards environment is to hope that
and to work hard so that in any standards environment we provide superior experience.
But we do support heterogeneous computing and communication.
In fact we're very involved in the ATM standards, right?
Absolutely, yes.
We're talking about that.
Okay.
I'd like to focus in a little more specifically on a question that I thought I was hearing
earlier and that is from what you said I understand that the very high end of the current Macintosh
line can handle voice recognition like Casper.
And that even better performance will come with specialized circuitry and new models.
No.
Just the simple RISC CPU, you know, has so much more power that basically you may not
even need a DSP.
The question I have is whether in fact we should be looking forward to Casper as a release
product at some time in the foreseeable future and how much you – I'd like to hear whatever
you can freely say about that.
Well, I could say that we're a research laboratory.
We're not a product organization.
In fact, we learn about the products in MacWeek.
We do.
Product decisions are absolutely out of our hands.
So we have absolutely no control and frequently very little knowledge on how the product divisions
are actually going to deploy these.
So I can't comment on that.
And even if I did know, you know, I'd be forbidden.
They would bring the firing squad out here and shoot me right on the spot if I said anything
like that.
But there are plenty of people around here who have the ability to brief you on that
kind of information so you can track them down.
In the research lab, we can't talk about that.
Yes.
Well, terrific.
Thank you very, very much.
Have a great –
Thank you.
Have a great –