Put That There (Original)

Stefan Marti
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2016–2026
YouTube
408K views · 20 years ago · demo · historical

The original 1979 MIT Architecture Machine Group demo of Put That There, in which a user sits before a wall screen and moves shapes around using voice commands and pointing. The pairing of speech with a pointing gesture was an early multimodal interface.

HN people use it as the touchstone for voice-plus-gesture interfaces, and cite it again whenever a new AI demo claims to invent pointing at things and talking to the computer.

“In the 1979 Put That There demo, the user at least used his hand to point things.”
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8 comments from Hacker News

f
@ffin2026 · in “Yet another way to invoke functions in JavaScript without parentheses”
this feels like a direct descendent of this work of art: ▶ this video
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b
@beardog2016 · in “Put That There (Original 1979) – MIT”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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l
@low_tech_punk2026 · in “GPT-6 Astra”
What's the point of enlarging the screen into a room? In the 1979 Put That There demo, the user at least used his hand to point things. The model is impressive but the demo felt like a step back. Original demo (fun ending) ▶ this video
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j
@jdougan2026 · in “Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era”
Nothing new under the sun. "Put that there" demo, 1982. link ▶ this video
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j
@jpatten2026 · in “Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era”
Reminds me of Put That There ▶ this video
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D
@DonHopkins2024 · in “GPT-4o”
>But it has some indeed magic ability to share a deictic frame of reference. They really Put That There! ▶ this video Oh, shit.
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A
@Animats2024 · in “Figure 01 robot demos its OpenAI integration”
> Selecting one of a set of pre-trained actions by voice is cool but not exactly ground-breaking. Yes. Compare "Put That There" (1979).[1] > The way that guy is standing perfectly still makes me think that it would fail if everything wasn't set up just so. I'd like to see demos with more variation. Yes. Unstructured manipulation is hard. Structured robotic manipulation is pretty standard. Picking isolated objects is a solved problem. Here's a robot recycling sorting system, "Max-AI".[2] That's been in use for years. San Francisco recycling uses those robots. So do many other cities. (That's from "Bulk Handling Systems", a company which does exactly what their name says. Recycling and trash come in bulk, and their machines handle it. Shakers, magnets, screens, and vision-based air sorters do 95% of the sorting. The robots only handle the hard cases. This is the no-bullshit end of AI.) [1] ▶ this video [2] link
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D
@DonHopkins2016 · in “Google rolls out “If This Then That” support for its $200 OnHub router”
Where would "If This Then That" be if not without "Put That There"? [1] [1] ▶ this video
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