Compaq Western Research Labs

In the Summer of 1999, just before the dot.com crash, I was a research intern at Compaq Western Research Labs (WRL). I was asked to work on a prototype handheld computer they were working on called the Itsy. It had a Linux OS and used Java for application programming, and it contained a 2D accelerometer. My job was to explore how the accelerometer could enhance the user interface experience.

The first thing I wrote was a game called Gravigory, where different shapes would show up in the center on the screen, and you had to tilt them into the correct containers at the sides. Later on I worked on a project to use the accelerometer as a locking/unlocking interface. (I dubbed the project Secret Handshake, but it never really caught on.) I used handwriting recognition techniques to record and match accelerometer movements. You would lock the device through the screen and record a gesture, and then unlocking the device would prompt you to repeat the gesture. It actually turned out to be a good approach to passwords because kinetic memory made gestures easy to remember and reproduce, but they were also unique to the owner and hard for others to reproduce, even if they saw the gesture performed. During the research, I had jokingly suggested that we should test they system in a plane to see if it would still work in transit.  On my last week at WRL, one of the researchers (Deborah Wallach) invited me on her private plane to record some data and test it out. I can tell you that the flight over the bay area was spectacular, and Secret Handshake continued to work when the plane was in a deep dive, but I never got around to recording much data that day.

I was also given the job of designing the intern T-shirt that Summer. My plan was to have another intern (Karen Han) hold the Itsy on the balcony in silhouette with the mountains in the background. I had only taken a few shots when Karen dropped it onto the sidewalk below. We were mortified: there were only 12 prototypes in the world, and now there were eleven. The was a beauty store on the first floor below us, and they had picked up the pieces and brought it inside their store. A couple of minutes later a group of Compaq employees rushed into the store, took it from them, and disappeared. (It must have seemed like an episode of the X Files to them.) Strangely, nobody was upset at us, and the whole event was taken as an opportunity to do more experiments: which components survived the drop, overclocking the motherboard, etc. So I decided to use an image of the smashed Itsy for the T-shirt with the caption, “Crash-testing the Future.”

At the end of the internship, they gave me an Itsy prototype to take with me, which I still have today.