Put That There

A pioneering multimodal interactive system built at MIT's Architecture Machine Group (1979-1980), reported by Bolt (1980) and further developed by Schmandt and Hulteen (1982). Users seated in a 'media room' could manipulate a graphical database — such as a Caribbean shipping map — by speaking natural commands while pointing at a large rear-projected screen; a wrist-worn Polhemus sensor tracked gestures and a head-mounted microphone captured speech. 'Put That There' is widely cited as the origin of modern multimodal interaction and as an early demonstration that combining imperfect input channels (voice + gesture) can yield a more usable system than either channel alone — a principle central to accessible input design.