Xerox PARC Announces Future of Reading Exhibit

Posted on June 20, 2001

Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center has announced the North American tour of PARC's ``XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading'' exhibit. The installation, developed by Xerox PARC and sponsored by Adobe Systems Incorporated, provides visitors with a glimpse into the future of reading. Some of the exhibits include the history of reading, digital books as big as a table top, a reading eye dog and a variety of electronic reading devices.

The tour opens June 23 at the Arizona Science Center, Phoenix, Ariz., and is scheduled to run at a number of venues through Dec. 31, 2003. The Association of Science -Technology Centers, Washington, D.C, will coordinate the tour.

Designed to appeal to readers of all ages, the exhibit also includes interactive displays on the 25,000-year history of reading, a DataGlyph decoder and a speed-reading machine. The journey takes visitors from the ancient manuscripts once available to a privileged few, to digital texts now available to anyone, anywhere. The hall will be filled with opportunities to explore how vastly different reading in the future might be, such as a reading-eye dog that reads aloud and a children's book with a digital soundtrack conducted by simple hand gestures.

``The future of reading will embrace a wide variety of new reading devices, new media genres and new forms of storytelling,'' said Rich Gold, manager of the Research in Experimental Documents (RED) group at PARC that designed and built the exhibits. ``In creating this exhibit, we let our imaginations run wild to speculate about the different ways we might read in the future. We assert that reading will not go away in a digital future, but it definitely will change.''