Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Media Laboratory
Electronic Publishing
Reproduced with permission from NeXT Computer, Inc.
A Reference Guide to NeXT in Higher Education, Fall 1992
ยช 1992 NeXT Computer, Inc

Working on the future with NeXTSTEP

  • Computers that take phone messages for you.
  • Personalized electronic newspapers.
  • Computers you can talk to (and they know what you're saying).

These might seem like they're straight out of a science fiction story, but at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory they're everyday occurrences. Since 1985, the high-tech think tank has been conducting research on how computers can improve the human-machine relationship-exploring new ways for humans to interact with every imaginable kind of media. The Lab's primary goal is to generate innovative prototypes of what computers could be doing 10 or 20 years from now.

In developing new ways for users to interact with their computers-projects that are beyond the reach of today's technology-Media Lab researchers rely on a number of computing environments, including NeXTSTEP.

"The point of our work is to show what computers can do, not to create finished products," says Research Specialist Pascal Chesnais. "The NeXT is a unique machine because it makes people think about how they can do innovative things. Plus, with NeXT, we're able to do a lot of things very quickly. For example, we can build an interface in 40 minutes using Interface Builder. That leaves us the time to be more expressive with how the interface looks and to add to its underlying functionality."

He continues, "NeXT has had the strongest impact on object-oriented programming of any computing environment around. NeXT did it the right way-being a thoroughly integrated object-oriented environment right from the start."

So far, the Lab has used NeXT's color picker object-one of more than 100 objects bundled with the NeXT Application Kit-to develop a color selection application, called ColSel. The problem of color selection is something the Lab has worked on for many years. Now users can select colors in relation to other colors in use in the user interface.

"With our add-on to the NeXT object, the application goes beyond simply changing the color of the background," says Chesnais. "The improved color system allows us to tweak colors so we can achieve the best color coordination possible-aligning the colors of the background and foreground of text, for example."

Currently ColSel is a separate application, though Chesnais says that one of the Lab's goals is to have ColSel communicate and integrate with NeXT's color picker, thus extending the NeXTSTEP color facilities.

In addition, researchers use NeXT computers in the electronic publishing arena-developing innovative methods for users to transmit and receive electronic information. One research area is narrowcasting, which involves communicating dedicated electronic information only to users who have specified it as their particular interest.

"We have our computers watching all the news, listening to the radio, collecting all the news wires, and so on," says Chesnais. "Since all of our sources have textual transcripts, we can repackage everything under computer control. In the case of ABC Nightly News, we use the closed caption to know when there are changes in stories and to relate them to the stories on the news wires. We can later print a newspaper containing salient stills from the ABC television newscast and with text from the wire services. NeXT is very close to delivering all this on a single platform."

Researchers also use NeXT machines to segment audio news-such as National Public Radio's "All Things Considered"-and then integrate the audio news feeds with traditional news wires, including Associate Press and Dow Jones. They also use a NeXT machine as a news server-to compile the more than 6,000 print articles that are transmitted to the Media Lab each day from such publications as the New York Times and United Press International news wire service.

Ultimately, if a user is interested in national politics and sports, for example, during the night a Media Lab application called NewsPeek, developed in the 1980s, scans and collects the relevant articles. Then, the next morning, a front page with graphics and color headlines pops onto the user's computer screen with sports and political articles. To read a story, the user selects the headline or the first paragraph and the full text comes into view. As the user reads, related articles that the computer has chosen appear to the side. NewsPeek also incorporates photographs and television film clips alongside the articles.

Today, the news system-now a multi-platform environment, including NeXTSTEP-has grown significantly, and there are a number of other modules for creating these electronic newspapers. An element of the system includes news gathering which is accomplished by having a NeXT machine act as a server and gatherer, collecting all the articles and preprocessing them to determine which communities of people are interested in them. Says Chesnais, "What makes NeXT attractive for the news server is that it can do the multi-threading in the most efficient method of dealing with a server that will get many requests."

A second element is the electronic editor which determines which articles to present to the user based on the user's activity at the time, and the presentation environment. Third is layout-the transcoding of the news to the presentation platform. Finally there is feedback: the user can provide feedback to the user modelling system on whether or not the user liked the article.

This represents the Lab's first wide area feedback news system, developed using NeXTSTEP, allowing NeXT users outside the Media Lab's network to receive news items via NeXTmail. Each news article would contain thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons. The icons are part of the NeXTSTEP application, developed by Lab researcher Douglas Koen, allowing the reader to indicate if he liked or disliked the article by double clicking the appropriate icon. The Lab has built feedback capabilities into other news systems, but none that allowed users to be outside the local network.

Although the news system has evolved across many non-NeXT platforms, Chesnais notes that "NeXT has an outstanding graphical interface and makes a very good visual front-end to applications we may create on other platforms. And using a NeXT computer as a news server has proved to be an efficient and affordable way to handle this task."

Other projects developed by Lab researchers include a telephone interface on a NeXT machine so the computer can be used as an intelligent answering machine. The interface is controlled via a serial port and pipes audio into the microphone input of a NeXT machine and the line level output of the computer back to the telephone interface. The telephone interface incorporates a Motorola 6811 microcontroller with specialized chips for DTMF encoding and decoding.

For more information, please contact:

Pascal Chesnais
Research Specialist
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Media Laboratory
Room E15-351
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
lacsap@media.mit.edu