reg:exp

Researching Interval Research

While reading Snibbe et al.'s article "Haptic Techniques for Media Control," (UIST2001, to be reviewed here shortly) I stumbled over a few references to the demise of the writers' former employer, Interval Research. The company was a secretive think tank focused on exploratory research, located on Page Mill Road, right behind Stanford's campus. Paul Allen started the lab with $100 million dollar in 1992, then pronounced it a failure and closed it down in 2000.

Wired wrote about a "shift in focus" from basic research to cable product development at Interval in 1999: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.12/interval.html

According to the Online Archive of California, most of Interval's documents are now held in Stanford's libraries: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf1s2001tx

Salon.com published a short post-mortem: http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2000/04/22/interval/

Gavin Miller was a researcher at Interval, as was Scott Snibbe.

Off on a tangent, Bill Gaver's work on auditory interfaces is worth looking into. Reference: 'Auditory interfaces' (1997) in Handbook of Interaction (2ed), Publisher: Elsevier, Editors: Helander, M G (external); Landauer,T K (external); and Prabhu, P (external). Link: http://www.rca.ac.uk/pages/research/dr_william_gaver_609.html