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Kenyan youths take on net skills
GLENDALE, Calif. - Maxwell Smart's "cone of silence" is finally a reality.
Two people in an office here were having a tête-à-tête, but it was impossible for a listener standing nearby to understand what they were saying. The conversation sounded like a waterfall of voices, both tantalizingly familiar and yet incomprehensible.
The cone of silence, called Babble, is actually a device composed of a sound processor and several speakers that multiply and scramble voices that come within its range. About the size of a clock radio, the first model is designed for a person using a phone, but other models will work in open office space.
The voice scrambling technology used in Babble was developed by Applied Minds, a research and consulting firm founded by Danny Hillis, a distinguished computer architect, and Bran Ferren, an industrial designer and Hollywood special effects wizard.
Babble, which is intended to function as a substitute for walls and acoustic tiling, is an example of a new class of product that uses computing technology to shape sound. Already on the market are headphones that can cancel extraneous noises and stereo systems that can direct sound to a particular location.
The system will be introduced in June by Sonare Technologies, a new subsidiary of Herman Miller, the maker of the Aeron chair, as part of an effort to move beyond office furniture. The company plans to sell the device for less than $400 through consumer electronics and office supply stores.
Herman Miller originally turned to Applied Minds without a specific product in mind; instead, they were hoping the firm would help it create new concepts.
"We complement each other well because Danny is a real scientist when it comes to deep analytics and physics," Mr. Ferren said of his partnership with Mr. Hillis. "I have a good general working knowledge and can give him insight on the aesthetics and design side."
The two men formed Applied Minds after leaving Walt Disney Imagineering in 2000. Mr. Hillis was a pioneer in the design of extremely powerful computers known as massively parallel supercomputers, having founded Thinking Machines, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that subsequently went out of business in 1982.
Mr. Ferren has been a leader in movie effects, working on such films as "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," and has won Academy Awards for technical achievement. He also developed mirrored sunglasses for Revo in the 1980's. Applied Minds, housed in a cluster of five converted warehouses here, is a technology playhouse for a group of 100 designers who work on projects ranging from designing buildings for government agencies to trying to treat cancer through the emerging field of proteomics, the study of proteins.
"I have known Danny for 25 years and Bran almost as long," said Nicholas Negroponte, the founding chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory. Their partnership, Mr. Negroponte said, "brings together two of the most interesting minds" in the country.
In addition to its work with Herman Miller, Applied Minds is developing some 40 new concepts and products for sponsors as diverse as General Motors, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Northrop Grumman, and the toymaker Funrise.
The Babble voice privacy system is the first commercial example of Applied Minds' approach in collaborative product design. The partnership with Herman Miller began three years ago after Mr. Hillis met Gary S. Miller, Herman Miller's chief development officer, at a technology and design conference in Monterey, Calif.
The Babble scrambling technology is not the first attempt at using technology to provide office privacy. Acoustic materials have been used for dampening sound and white noise generators are commercially available, but the Herman Miller executives said that their new system was more effective.
While many companies resist outside design collaboration, Herman Miller is unusual in that it has traditionally formed partnerships with independent industrial designers in the furniture business, Mr. Miller said.
"Our model has been to use outsiders," he said. "We needed to do that to enter new markets."
Herman Miller has a long history of exploring the leading edges of office furniture and computer technology. The company worked with the computer scientist Douglas C. Engelbart during the 1960's to design furniture and office systems that would help workers collaborate more effectively.
In fact, a walk through Applied Minds' warehouses reveals many projects that seem to adopt the Engelbart approach of looking for ways to harness machines to augment human intelligence. With Northrop Grumman, the design firm is experimenting with teleconferencing, looking for ways to build systems that are useful for colleagues who work far apart from one another.
Mr. Ferren is particularly interested in finding novel solutions to design problems. All the bookshelves in the company's offices, for example, are tilted 15 degrees to one side as a way to keep books neatly stacked.
In forming an alliance with Herman Miller, Mr. Hillis proposed a yearlong experiment period, which would allow the two companies to work together on broad ideas. After that, they could either commit to a product development project or go separate ways.
After the first year, it was clear that their collaboration would work. In addition to underwriting the cost of developing the Babble technology, Sonare, the Herman Miller subsidiary, will pay licensing fees to Applied Minds. The hope is that in addition to its office uses, Babble will also be helpful in public places where privacy is important, like hospital admitting stations or restaurants.
Herman Miller and Applied Minds are now moving toward the completion of a product line for a separate Herman Miller subsidiary, Viaro.
That line, which will be introduced later this year, is a flexible system for reorganizing walls, lighting systems, and power and computer networks in retail stores and offices. Based on parallel tracks mounted in the ceiling, the Viaro system will contain modular components that can be easily reconfigured and plugged into the tracks.
For Mr. Hillis, Applied Minds has allayed a frustration he felt while running Thinking Machines in the 1980's.
"What I really loved was making the first one of something," he said. "That was a lesson out of Thinking Machines. Most of the business is about the rest of the process of bringing a product to market."
Mr. Hillis said that Applied Minds, which is partially underwritten by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and Millennium Technology Ventures of New York, is already profitable. He said it had no intention of becoming a public company. Instead, the company hopes that some of its designs will lead to spinoff companies that will be profitable for the investors.
One of the prototypes closest to becoming a candidate for a spinoff is a novel tabletop digital map, about the size of a large flat panel television. The system has a touch-sensitive screen, making it possible to handle high-resolution digital imagery as easily as sliding a paper map across a table.
The system is controlled by a series of hand gestures. For example, to zoom on a region, a user touches both hands to the screen and slides them apart.
Mr. Hillis recently demonstrated the system, which was developed for a government agency (under the contract, Mr. Hillis is not allowed to name it), to a large convention of cartographers in San Diego.
"People came up afterwards and said they were moved to tears by the demonstration," Mr. Hillis said.
When a recent visitor mentioned that the demonstration was like something from "Star Trek," Mr. Hillis was visibly enthusiastic.
"That's what I've always wanted to do," he said. "Be ahead of 'Star Trek.' "
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