Xerox LiveBoard

The LiveBoard was not a standalone product — it was the centerpiece of the Colab (Collaboration Laboratory), a custom-designed electronic meeting room at Xerox PARC completed in 1987. The room featured motorized desks, specially designed no-glare lighting, an 'electern' (electronic lectern with height-adjustable keyboard), and four networked Dorado workstations. The philosophy was total environmental design: every surface, every light, every piece of furniture was optimized for computer-supported group work. Mark Stefik wrote: 'We did not want to lose the emotional impact of a big whiteboard — something that you view from ten feet rather than ten inches.'

The LiveBoard's position sensing was brilliantly pragmatic. A laser with a rotating polygon mirror — literally cannibalized from Xerox's copier imaging systems — was mounted in the upper right corner of the board. Mirrors and retro-reflectors on two edges of the board reflected the sweeping laser beam. When a finger or pen touched the surface, it interrupted the beam, and the system triangulated the interruption's position. This was a 'skunkworks' build by a Xerox engineering team in Webster, New York — using their own company's copier parts to build a collaborative computer display. An alternative ultrasonic pen position detection system was also developed and patented (US 4,974,173 and 4,814,552).

The commercial LiveBoard launched May 18, 1993 at $49,500. It ran on an Intel 486 processor with Microsoft Windows, connected via Ethernet and telephone modems. Early adopters included Daimler-Benz, which used LiveBoards to share product designs between Pittsburgh and Ulm, Germany. By 2000, LiveWorks had sold over 2,000 units. The Tivoli software (Elin Rønby Pedersen, Kim McCall, Thomas P. Moran, Frank G. Halasz, 1993) brought pen gestures — scrubbing to erase, circling to select — to informal meeting whiteboarding, establishing interaction patterns that would influence tablet computing decades later.