Venture Geek

I had the pleasure of visiting Onomy Labs today, as part of a small group of folks from the Berkeley Digital Media and Entertainment Club (of which I am an alumnus). Thanks to Seth Familian for hooking it up.

Onomy was born out of Xerox PARC — when they were downsizing a group of researchers looking at interaction design left to start their own thing, and Onomy Labs is the result. Chief Technical Onomist, Scott Minneman showed us three demos of the kind of work Onomy does. The first was the Tilty Table, which provides a unique tactile user interface experience. They shine an image onto a table top, and you can then pan and zoom on that image (in the demo we saw they were all birds-eye images of cities) by tilting and twisting the table. A+ on the wow factor here, though the real-world usability was questionable for any application that isn’t built around showing off that wow factor. But, we talked about how you could layer on other UI metaphors, like some kind of touch screen to make the whole thing more versatile (and it would definitely provide an awesome experience for the right kind of games). The next thing we looked at was The Interactive Digital Wall. The example they have in their office is one used at TED in 2003. Picture a wall, with, in this case, the various days of a conference and the names of the speakers on those days. Now, picture a large monitor (in this case a plasma TV turned to be in portrait perspective) that rolls on rails along the length of the wall. As you move the monitor along the wall, the content you see on the screen reflects what’s on the wall behind it (here’s a picture of what I’m talking about). Last time I was at The Tech Museum (about a year ago) they had one of Onomy’s walls that had two dimensions of movement of the monitor. The last demo was a rig that could “read” text out loud using cameras, OCR, and speech synthesis, but it was all put into a character of a dog — the idea was to help kids learn reading, I think. The point was that it was the total design of the system, made to appeal to a particular audience rather than just the raw underlying technology, which is often boring at best and intimidating at worst for most non-geeks. In short, Onomy’s core strength is imagining and building unique interaction pieces for museums, businesses, and, well, anyone else with such interests. Pretty cool stuff.

Onomy is a small shop, and they seem to like it that way. Their average project sounds like it’s in the mid-five-figures range, and they are only 7 people on staff. But, with high-profile appearances at places like TED and the upcoming Foo Camp, I would look for Onomy to continue to build a strong reputation with lots of influential people, and hopefully that should bring them much success.