Parc: Xerox's global playground

It's a moment now immortalized in TV fiction: Steve Jobs, played by Noah Wylie, striding into the offices of Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center to view the wonders that would become the Macintosh computer. It meant triumph for Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. but would also brand Parc's reputation in history: a knowledge factory that sprouted the greatest ideas in computer technology, but never had the gumption to turn them into businesses.

Xerox these days is taking a sharper look at Parc's role with an eye toward commercializing some of the ideas this time.

But at its heart, Parc retains some of its speculative nature, a place where research, even if it's tied to products, carries the air of trying to find new possibilities in the future.

That's the mindset that Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown presented at last November's Comdex trade show as he and chief executive Richard Thoman showed off Parc's latest prize projects. "The best way to understand the present is to create futures, possible futures," Brown told the crowd.

Much of the work at Parc these days falls between basic and applied research. The best example is a modular robot, built of small nodes that can join themselves in slinky lines to form a rolling, crawling or walking metallic beast. Brown capped his Comdex speech by having one of these "polybots" crawl onto the stage and change its shape a few times.

Existing at the intersection of pure and applied science, Xerox Parc's 'polybots' are modular robots that can relink nodes to change shape.

Parts of the project might seem like basic research, particularly the control software that gives the parts intelligence and allows them to communicate. But the project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency with an eye toward an eventual application that is not being revealed.

Parc's work with smart matter is a piece of that. "We want to be part of that revolution and not just the consumer of it," said Ross Bringans, manager of the Electronic Materials Laboratory.

Thoman and Brown had handfuls of eye-catching technology to show the Comdex audience, either in live demonstrations or through videotape.

Brown held up a fingernail-sized device containing thousands of vertical-cavity lasers, a replacement for the bulky gas lasers being used in printers. He also showed a sensor-laden Personal Digital Assistant that always displays its picture right side up.

Videotapes also showed how Parc is continuing to delve into the user interface, one example being a tabletop used to view portions of a document 40 feet square. By tilting the table, the user "scrolls" the view in any particular direction and projectors make the document flow like liquid across the surface for easy scanning.

"We're doing things which are a long way from being products, but it's different from the kind of research that was being done when I first got here," Bringans said. New disciplines such as materials science have been added.

Parc's building is a melting pot of 400 computer scientists, mathematicians, sociologists, physicists, linguists and anthropologists studying not just new technologies but the ways people interact with technologies.

Parc also has an artist in residence.

As with the GUI work of the 1970s, Xerox is trying to determine how to better let human beings communicate with their machines.

Parc is built in pods. Corners of the building are arranged as common areas for relaxing and kicking around ideas. "One of the things we're trying to foster is something common" among the different disciplines, Bringans said. "A lot of it is sort of hallway meetings," he said.

Formally, Parc's charter is to find the future of Xerox and to help the company adapt to it. Part of the goal is to determine when a future technology should be moved into the product realm, to "try to get a methodology for when it makes sense to do these things," said Bringans.

Practical applications are part of the job too and to that end Bringans is working on laser-printing technologies. One promising technology is a plane of precision air jets that can position or rotate paper with micron-level precision. The idea would be to move paper through a printer at variable rates, so that if a page is taking long to print, the next page will be moved into position more slowly.

Even such a clear-cut practical application is leading Parc into new realms of study. "The point about the air jets is not so much that it moves paper — although that's interesting in itself — but that we're pushing the boundaries of what you can do with that many sensors," Bringans said. The difficulty lies not in the air jets themselves but in controlling that much precision in that many separate parts.

"We're trying to do two things at once. One is a short-term concrete goal, but the other is to make sure we're learning something really valuable on the way," Bringans said. "It's hard to pick a particular project and say it's short-term or long-term, because most things have aspects of both."

Parc's mission was reconsidered a few years ago, with the center's studies grouped into five areas that ultimately were combined to form three themes: networked devices; knowledge ecologies, which explores alternative ways of sharing information, and smart matter, which includes the polybot and air-jet projects.

Even within those boundaries, researchers have plenty of freedom to pick their projects. "Part of it comes out of the culture," Bringans said. "Part of it is the desire to be contrarian and not do the thing that's sexy."

The Century of the Engineer: Companies that made a difference