'A hanging garden of Babylon overlooking Silicon Valley," is Rich Gold's whimsical description of the most famous research laboratory in the history of computing. Set into the hills above Stanford University, the blocky buildings of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, or Parc, have tiered gardens, roomy windowed offices, and views of San Francisco Bay and the roofs of the corporate powerhouses that worship the silicon chip.
Oddly, the place where virtually all of modern computing was invented is not a computer company at all but a self-proclaimed "document company". Windows, screen icons, the mouse, the laser printer, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) printing and Ethernet (a method of connecting computers into a high-speed local network), even funny screensavers - all were developed more than two decades ago in Xerox's Parc. Xerox brought almost none of these ideas to market.
Such twists and turns of fate leave Xerox working hard to re-establish its digital credentials, especially since it hopes to forge a reputation as an internet technologies and business solutions company.
Turning the company in new directions has been a partial contributor to severe quarterly losses recently, but Parc seems oblivious to something as ephemeral as quarterly results.
"Parc is a cauldron of ideas, of thought, of new technology," says the pony-tailed Gold, whose company biography describes him as an "applied cartoonist" and "former consultant in virtual reality". Parc "is like a great university, with all the kids taken out". New ideas include curious prototype modular robots that can move by themselves, link and modify their function as part of a larger unit. They now make simple snake and spider forms but researchers want to create them on a microscopic level, where millions would gather to create working objects.
"You could buy a box of modules and tell them to make a printer," suggests Gold, although he adds dryly that this particular research area "won't be a product soon".
The lab has a full-blown Mems (micro electro mechanical systems) division. Mems are minute machines built on a silicon chip; researchers have created, for example, tiny mechanised tweezers capable of grabbing a single bacterium.
Xerox is interested in optical Mems, which could enhance printers and copiers. Now such devices run on a single or dual laser focused through a mirror - a printing mechanism that is book-sized - but Mems could make them pea-sized.
One project involves placing hundreds of silicon mirrors on a single microchip, then tilting them to direct an array of several hundred lasers. Another aims to position thousands of lasers on a single chip. These technologies would enable what researcher Eric Peeters calls "bat out of hell printing".
Another division is exploring the use of multiple microchip sensors that could eventually make inanimate matter intelligent. Researcher Feng Zhao says that peppercorn-sized sensors could one day be sprayed across a road surface, enabling the road to tell a car the traffic conditions for a region and select the best route. He imagines a world of smart environments where sensors would provide factual information to be analysed by computers, enabling humans "to bridge two worlds - the physical world and the digital and virtual world".
Individual sensors could eventually be part of a vast feedback network on the net, as well, he says, since individual sensors could be given their own internet address.
Underlying all Xerox research is ethnography, the study of human behaviour. Xerox employs some 15 ethnographers. One of them, Jack Whalen, says ethnogra phy is "at the very heart of this center" because of a study at Parc decades ago. Researchers videotaped volunteers who were told to make certain kinds of copies on a copier they had never used before. The engineers and researchers were stunned to see that real people didn't interact with the machine in the ways they expected and were confused by features that were supposed to be self-explanatory. The video led to a radical rethink at Parc and now ethnographers routinely work on all research projects.
"Truly useful technology supports and enhances natural human capacities and practices," says Whalen. "We're trying to look five, 10, 20 years down the road and ethnography helps with that human-scape envisioneering." This may sound rather bizarre, but out of the strange and idiosyncratic often come flashes of brilliance athat mark a pure research laboratory. "Parc is about inventing the future," says Whalen.
