The Scattered Computer

   Tablets
   Slates
   Smartphones

   Together As One

Objects

   In your hands
   Scattered
   Around your desk

Work

   Organized as
   Cognitively bound to

Physical objects

   Not windows on a screen

A personal computing interface composed of multiple, integrated computing objects.


Computing Scattered Into Physical Space


Scatrd is a computer interface that replaces windows on a screen with multiple, physical computing objects scattered about one's desk and workspace.

The Scatrd system has been employed as an everyday computing environment since 1996. Its components have varied over time, changing as technology has advanced the state of wireless networking, hardware and software.

The first Scatrd system combined multiple portable and handheld computers that were linked wirelessly through remote, open source Internet servers housed in large data centers (what we now call “The Cloud”) via a wide area wireless CDPD network piggybacking on the analog cellular system.

Advances in high speed wide area wireless networking and tactilly responsive mobile computing hardware and software have made the Scatrd interface an ever richer, more human environment for everyday computing.

The Scatrd interface is the future of computing.