BYU crew 'spills' data on table

PROVO — Dan Olsen had never seen a computer before he arrived at Brigham Young University as a student in 1971. The computer was a massive machine that filled an entire wing of the Talmadge Building.

Today, Olsen is a BYU computer science professor who carries around more computing power in his shirt pocket.

But smaller computers, cell phones and video game machines also come with smaller screens that make it hard to work on a spreadsheet or browse the Internet and condense the graphics of video games.

Olsen and his students are working on a solution that would allow owners of all kinds of handheld devices to walk up to a smart tabletop, set down their gadget and see the screen "spill" out onto the table.

Instead of using a stylus — that slim little "pen" that users poke at or swipe across their tiny handheld screens — a user can use the smart table like a touchscreen, using fingers to move the screen's image around the table or manipulate the data.

The scrolling is similar to what many laptop users now do instead of using a mouse.

Olsen hatched the idea last year when he was on sabbatical at Microsoft Research, where he said a group of computer scientists would sit around "trying to think of cool things to build."

"I was working on a laptop and carrying it between home, my office at BYU and Microsoft in Seattle," he said.

Now he calls laptops "boat anchors."

"I didn't want to carry mine everywhere, and everybody else was doing it, too. We had our handhelds on the table one day and someone asked the question, 'Why can't we just spread our screens out on the table?"'

Microsoft plans to bring a smart table to the arcade game market next year.

"If Microsoft successfully convinces the public it wants a table to play games, they'll be everywhere," he said.

But those tables have computers built into them. Olsen's idea is to let people carry their computing with them in their pockets, to have smart tables that allow anyone to walk up and spill out whatever is on the screen of a cell phone or a BlackBerry, manipulate their pictures or numbers or games on the table, then pick up the device and walk away with new and saved information.

"Everything we do is happening on the handhelds, not on the table," Olsen said.

The ultimate outcome would be to allow multiple people to have their handhelds interact on the table at the same time.

"You want to be able to go in, spread stuff out, pass it to each other and work together, then leave," Olsen said.

The whole idea could take five years to get to market because of the high price of the screens. The BYU team is also working on security.