I filed a report for Wired News today on the goings-on inside R&D firm Applied Minds, founded by former Disney Imagineers Bran Ferren (at right in the snapshot I took below) and Danny Hillis (left).
We walk through a series of curving white hallways punctuated with oddities — remnants of spaceships over here, posters from turn-of-the-century traveling magic shows over there. We enter a dark room that vibrates with a quiet, electronic purr. In the middle stands a table covered with a vivid, full-color map bathed in light from an overhead projector.
"This is something I've always dreamed about," says Hillis, grinning widely. "I always loved big paper maps I could spread out on a table, but later I loved computer screens because you can make them dance for you. This combines both."
He taps the map surface and sweeps his hands apart, as if he's swimming. The Earth zooms closer. North America becomes California, then Los Angeles, then we see tiny parking spaces with human silhouettes. He drags a finger, and the map sweeps east; he drags it another direction, and the world follows.
Both hands scoop together, and we fly back out again. He squeezes the world into a ball and spins it. He pauses, and looks up at me. "Your mouth is dropping open!" he laughs.
A few paces away, Hillis demos another high-tech map table — at the flick of a button, this one bursts into life. Mountains rise up, valleys drop down, seas flatten. Underneath the map's synthetic material surface, a system of pins raise or lower in groups to dynamically form shapes. I pet a mountain, then trace down a bumpy ravine with my index finger, and caress a smooth riverbed. My jaw remains open. The "Earth" feels alive.
Hillis explains that this device is called the 2.5-D display, and was developed with Northrop Grumman. "They've used the first ones internally," Hillis shrugs. "We don't know what we're going to do with it yet."
