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Future Watch: Digital Clothing, Fax Pens

Experts predict new ways to display and share data and images.

By Ashlee Vance, IDG News   

Imagine walking into a meeting 20 years from now wearing a suit made not of cloth but rather of digital fabric displaying images and text for all to see. Then picture the table in the center of the room as a digital canvas laden with three-dimensional pie charts and emitting audio clips from your company's chief executive officer about last quarter's financial results.

Do these scenarios sound feasible? Well, a group of industry experts held court Wednesday here at the Seybold publishing conference and delivered a very similar picture of the written word's future.

Leading scientists and executives from Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, Sun Microsystems, The Institute for the Future, and Adobe Systems gave their thoughts in a keynote panel discussion here on the future of the publishing industry, including the ways in which human interaction with text will change over the next two decades.

More than anything else, the pundits suggested that people will interact with the world--or the surfaces that make up their surroundings--in a way that will revolutionize how they understand content.

"The endgame is to get to a point where there aren't any user interfaces," John Warnock, Adobe cofounder, chair, and chief executive officer, said. Like his fellow panelists, Warnock presented a vision of the future so rich in seamless forms of technology that the user no longer even realizes that the technology is there.

John Seely Brown, chief scientist and director at Xerox PARC, brought along a piece of digital paper that he saw as a possible first step toward this seamless future. While the current uses of the paper are limited, Seely Brown proposed that the product could eventually create a highly interactive reading environment for the user in which any type of surface could be a digital display.

Unlike simply picking up a book and following along with the text, the user could touch certain parts of the digital paper to activate sounds, see 3D images of characters in a novel or even the text itself, or click on items to reveal entire layers of information. Seely Brown went so far as to pick up a pen and say, "If you run this over digital paper, it becomes a portable fax or printer."

The panel did assure the Seybold crowd that good old-fashioned paper should be around for some time to come but added that people have already had a few hundred years to master what can be done with the medium. "We are going to create new media forms that do not even make sense [using paper]," Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, said.

Saffo, in particular, supported Napster-like approach to developing technology in the publishing world. "Napster is not an aberration," he said, referring to the music-sharing Web site that has drawn the ire of the music industry.

He sees those who rebel against the status quo of technology as being on the path to success and innovation. Saffo urged the audience to ignore the entertainment industry's recent objections to the type of peer-to-peer file sharing evangelized by Napster's Web site and instead embrace the people-pushing boundaries as the quickest path to more efficient and elegant technology. "Pirating software is market development," he said.

The panelists painted a picture of the years to come that will place individuals in a world rich with information and that requires a good deal of interactivity.

"Augmenting human intelligence, that's the point," John Gage, chief researcher and director of Sun's Science Office, said. Perhaps 20 years from now, a computer will not be the box under your desk but rather the desk, the chair you sit on, or the coffee cup you hold, he said.