Ancient art-work and paintings lie strewn around, traditional pots, jackets, musical instruments litter the place, there’s a glimpse of Indian heritage in almost everything you see. Clearly, Ranjit Makkuni’s lab looks like anything but a lab.

And Makkuni himself looks like the archetypal artist. Dressed in an ethnic kurta pyjama and jacket, he greets you with a warm smile, and you you wonder whether this man can actually be a scientist... But all your doubts vanish when he speaks, and very passionately too, about his latest venture. "Indians have been doing extremely well with development work in the Silicon Valley, but the irony is that most of the work remains either unnoticed or the credit goes to some suave, glib-speaking multinational company. I have always wanted to create something that is our very own," he says.

A leading research scholar at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the US, Makkuni carries with him decades of PARC’s multimedia expertise in developing tools for cultural learning. He and his team of designers are presently engaged in putting together a thoroughly interactive set of exhibits as part of ‘The Crossing Project.’

Blending art and tech
Taking communication beyond desktop-mouse and static documents, the project demonstrates futuristic forms of information access tools and aims to open up the next wave of digital document experience by creating a ‘living document’. The idea is to shift away from regular objects such as keyboards or monitors to digital presentation in 3D, with a more dynamic form of surround sight and sound. The interface gadgets, when held and touched, unfold any info that you may want.

"The not-so-tech-savvy usually get daunted when they see complicated hi-tech instruments," Makkuni explains. "So we have used objects that most Indians are already familiar with. This, then, can appeal to a wider range of people and they can learn from them." These new high-touch portals include a specially made wearable coat, the knowledge-egg, paper-multimedia and other user interfaces like tilt-based browsing, gestural interfaces and multi-level physical/virtual documents.

The theme of the launch project is ‘The Crossing—Living, Dying and Transformation in Benaras’. The name ‘Crossing’ comes from the Sanskrit word tirtha, meaning a pilgrimage site and by extension a cosmic crossing point and sacred place for transformation. The exposition offers a rich learning experience to the student community, IT experts, scientists, technologists, the art and culture fraternity, as also the public at large. It displays the environment of Benaras—the ghats, temples, shivlings, a flowing river, priests, cremation points—that you want to see, to learn more about the mythical from, philosophical aspects that are associated with them.

Makkuni, also a sitar player and disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, has deep roots in traditional art and his passion for innovative research in multimedia technology help him bridge the technology-art divide. "As the birth-place of major world religions and rich cultural heritage of classical and folk art forms, India serves as the best experimental lab to bring hi-tech digital documentation and traditional art together for building the future technology of learning," he says.

Makkuni has specially set up a media lab of Xerox PARC in New Delhi to facilitate this project. PARC researchers, together with robotics/embedded systems experts from the Indian Institute of Technology, designers from National Institute of Information Technology, the National School of Design, and with a network of museums including IGNCA, New Delhi; NGMA, Mumbai; Asia Society, New York—all are working on the exhibits.

A visionary approach
Makkuni has been part of the System Concept Lab of PARC since 1985 and was involved in the visionary group that developed the world’s first graphic user interface. He pioneered explorations in computer-aided design and developed an interesting research space of active learning at PARC. The active learning projects help developing cutting-edge technology for cultural learning applications.

He has also been part of the team that has explored new forms of multimedia access to content. The invention of Hyperpaper, a medium that explores paper as an interface to multimedia imagery is only one futuristic example. His creation—the electronic sketchbook of Tibetan Thangka painting—was displayed at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco in 1989. It was described as the first example of computer-based cultural learning tool. Closer home, in 1998, Ranjit collaborated with India’s top scholars and designers at the Indira Gandhi Center for the Arts to develop the Gita Govinda multimedia experience.

Founded in 1970, Xerox PARC, in its 31-year legacy of innovations, has played a distinct role in introducing transformative technologies for future businesses and is widely known for revolutionary innovations in personal computing. The Crossing Project is also in tune with its vision of revolutionizing the digital document and the knowledge-sharing process.

Instead of this type of experiment originating in the West and traveling to India, Xerox PARC and Xerox in India decided that such technologies should originate in India—thus was born the lab in Delhi. And the show is just beginning...

Shweta Verma—Dataquest