The Active Desk & Prototyping the Future

This short clip demonstrates a paint program that is implemented on a large drafting-table format display called The Active Desk. The software is a version of a paint program called Studio Paint, developed by Alias Research (later Alias|Wavefront) in toronto Canada. The Active Desk was originally developed around 1992 at the University of Toronto, in conjunction with the Arnott Design Group of Toronto. this demo was shot in 1995 the the Research Group at Alias|Wavefront. One of the key points that ithis video makes is that to engineer the future tomorrow you have to have lived in it yesterday. Prototypes such as this are an example of doing so. This system gave us the ability to gain experience with technologies that are only now, in 2010, starting to appear in a form that has a chance of going mainstream.