No Limits
David I. Raitt · 2023
Over twenty years ago, the Architecture Machine Group at MIT had an experimental version of SDMS – a multimedia information room with touch sensitive TV monitors, microphones, pressure sensitive joysticks, data entry tablets and more. The spatial world of SDMS consisted of a single plane or surface called Dataland which was continually visible to the user in an aerial, top-view display. In the UK, ICL and Electrolux are marketing a fridge incorporating a touchscreen PC, TV, modem and bar-code scanner. Other developmental systems can take the kind of thing a stage further – supermarkets like Tesco and Safeway. Using smart customer loyalty cards, supermarkets can analyse up to four months of purchases for a given shopper and come up with a definitive list from which the shopper can select items using a PalmPilot and then couple it to a mobile phone and send to the shop.