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BURBANK, California -- From outside, the five nondescript buildings that house research and development firm Applied Minds look like any other on this jacaranda-lined street in this city's industrial zone.
But inside, everything's different.
Co-founder Danny Hillis escorts me down a hallway that dead-ends into an old-fashioned red phone booth. The phone rings. He places receiver to ear.
"The blue moon jumps over the purple sky," he says, and hangs up.
Suddenly, the booth becomes a door, swinging out to reveal a vast, open room filled with engineers, gadgets and big ideas.
It's as if Willy Wonka's chocolate factory just yawned wide to welcome us. Only here, all the candy plugs in.
"This is where the secret laboratories are," Hillis says.
To our left, two employees chat behind a desk. Their conversation is a burbling, unintelligible stream. It's as if someone poured their words into a blender, then hit "puree."
That's because their speech has been scrambled by Babble, a gadget designed by Applied Minds, with office furniture company Herman Miller, for creating sonic privacy in workspaces without walls.
Herman Miller will begin selling the device in July. It works by electronically listening, then repeating back random bits of what it hears. The resulting sound is blurred -- as if familiar voices were speaking in a foreign language I can't quite make out.
"We're hard-wired to like the way the human voice sounds," explains Hillis. "The problem isn't sound -- the problem is that the search for meaning demands attention. Noise that settles into the background can be very pleasant."
They discovered an unintended but welcome effect during initial user tests. Office loudmouths became more aware of just how loudly they were speaking, and lowered their voices.
"There are plenty of people out there who could design electronics, psychologists who could tell you that meaning demands attention and architects who could tell you we need to make open offices work better," says Hillis, "but we think about all of those things together."
The cross-disciplinary wizardry behind Babble is typical of the array of projects Applied Minds takes on with clients including General Motors, Northrop Grumman and other large organizations that prefer to remain anonymous.
The firm's current slate of works in progress is diverse: an online search and collaboration system called Metaweb, a project to identify and match specific cancer treatments based on attributes of a patient's body chemistry and new teleconferencing products that promise what Applied Minds co-founder Bran Ferren calls "high emotional resolution."
"I've never understood why so many people feel they have to draw hard lines between art and science," says Ferren. "Dabbling in lots of different things doesn't seem unusual to us."
The duo founded Applied Minds in 2000 after departing from Walt Disney Imagineering.
Ferren, an Academy Award-winning visual-effects mastermind, was president of research and development and creative technology.
Hillis joined Disney through a fellowship program and went on to become vice president of R&D. He previously co-founded Thinking Machines, a company considered a pioneer in the field of massive parallel supercomputing and RAID disk arrays. He is also the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.
They decided to team up independently when they realized they had a wider set of interests than their employer. "We wanted to do more than entertainment," says Hillis. "We wanted to build airplanes and invent electronic things." The duo departed amicably; Disney even rented warehouse space to Applied Minds.
For Hillis, the new company fulfilled a long-held childhood dream.
"We build things that are so small you have to look at them under an electron microscope. We design things the size of buildings," he says. "We build vehicles you can ride in. We build toys.
"If you could go back in time and find my notebook from 10 years old, you'd see little diagrams of where I wanted to put the machine shop, the electronics lab, and if you wander around here, it pretty much follows those plans."
As we walk through, we pass a garage workshop.
Here, we find one of Ferren's pet projects, the MaxiMog -- a "high mobility vehicle designed for exploring this (or similar) planets" that looks like the lovechild of a Hummer and the Mars Rover. Built on a Mercedes-Benz chassis, the vehicle is designed to team up with a trailer and motorbike, and includes long- and short-range wireless communication systems to keep planetary explorers connected.
We traverse another warehouse, then step into a stripped-down office where designers are developing Motis, an office-interior infrastructure product for Herman Miller subsidiary Viaro.
Grooved trays hang from an exposed ceiling. Lighting, electrical outlets and cable are popped in here and there like toy bricks.
The system is designed to be programmed by the office-dwellers themselves; no need to call an electrician or CAT-5 installer whenever one wants to pop in a new power outlet or drop in some fresh cable.
By pointing and clicking what looks like a slender TV remote with an infrared sensor at one end, Hillis "introduces" a wall switch to an overhead light, then a thermostat. He then flips the wall switch, and the selected elements turn on.
"The idea is to create programmable space, a peer-to-peer network of tools," says Hillis. "Instead of relying on a central building controller, you just introduce the client device to the switch, and say, 'Guys, talk amongst yourselves for a while.'"
An early user test is under way at an Urban Outfitters retail store in Manhattan. Herman Miller plans to launch the product later in 2005.
We walk through a series of curving white hallways punctuated with oddities -- remnants of spaceships over here, posters from turn-of-the-century traveling magic shows over there. We enter a dark room that vibrates with a quiet, electronic purr.
In the middle stands a table covered with a vivid, full-color map bathed in light from an overhead projector.
"This is something I've always dreamed about," says Hillis, grinning widely. "I always loved big paper maps I could spread out on a table, but later I loved computer screens because you can make them dance for you. This combines both."
He taps the map surface and sweeps his hands apart, as if he's swimming. The Earth zooms closer. North America becomes California, then Los Angeles, then we see tiny parking spaces with human silhouettes. He drags a finger, and the map sweeps east; he drags it another direction, and the world follows.
Both hands scoop together, and we fly back out again. He squeezes the world into a ball and spins it. He pauses, and looks up at me.
"Your mouth is dropping open!" he laughs.
A few paces away, Hillis demos another high-tech map table -- at the flick of a button, this one bursts into life. Mountains rise up, valleys drop down, seas flatten. Underneath the map's synthetic material surface, a system of pins raise or lower in groups to dynamically form shapes.
I pet a mountain, then trace down a bumpy ravine with my index finger, and caress a smooth riverbed. My jaw remains open. The "Earth" feels alive.
Hillis explains that this device is called the 2.5-D display, and was developed with Northrop Grumman.
"They've used the first ones internally," Hillis shrugs. "We don't know what we're going to do with it yet."
While such projects may create involuntary jaw-dropping in visitors like me, one thing Ferren and Hillis won't be applying their minds to is their own list of shared accomplishments.
"The last thing I think about is my legacy," says Ferren. "I never have enough time in the day to think about what's possible. Where do people find the time to sit around and stew over what they've already done?"
