Smart Home Office - MIT 1977 Version

Layout of the room with the installed system

Many ideas that are implemented in modern projects cannot be called modern. They occurred to many people in the past, but were not implemented for various reasons - either the technologies were not suitable for the realization of the idea, then the contemporaries simply did not understand the idea, or the author of the idea didn’t try to realize it too much.

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and now and before offered and offers interesting projects. Back in 1977, a team of researchers from MIT created a real smart system that can recognize speech, finger touches, gestures. This system could even make phone calls at the request of the user. The system is called Spatial Data Management System.
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The project was based on what the authors of the system called “spatial thinking”. According to them, people constantly use space, people manipulate space for their own purposes. In addition, an ordinary person remembers where what lies in the house (in most cases) and where what object is located in his hometown.

The system consisted of a special chair, which received the name "Captain Kirk Chair", a projector, and several other elements like eight-channel audio. A pair of touchpads and joysticks were built into the chair. There were also touch screens - Tektronix color monitors. All the content and functions that were supposed to be managed were placed on the main screen, which was projected onto the wall in front of the user (1.8 * 2.4 m).

There were even applications - a calculator, maps, photos and video viewers + reader for books. And yes, do not forget - we are talking about the late 70s of the last century! 4 mini-computers were used as a control system (detailed characteristics are here .

As mentioned above, the system could be controlled by voice. By giving a voice command, a user could launch an application, make a phone call, or record a voice memo. According to the developers, Spatial Data Management System was the first multimedia computer. The problem was the primitiveness of the chips that were used to control the system. If the electronics overheated, nothing worked. If the temperature was too low, the system did not work again. Developers had to set up the system for hours to demonstrate its work.

Below is a video where you can understand how it all works. The user performs the following actions:

1:08 min. View a photo, zoom in and out of a photo;
2:02 Scrolling through the pages of a book using the trackpad;
4:30 Voice commands to stop scrolling photos and display the card;
5:05 Voice commands for making a phone call and finding a contact;
7:55 Calculator;
8:48 Maps;
9:37 Video playback (part of “Colombo”) and the use of touchscreen to control playback.