The Tivoli team in 1991. From left to right: Frank Halasz, Elin Rønby Pedersen, Kim McCall, Tom Moran.

Tivoli explored pen input, while also providing a large interaction surface and support for remote collaboration. The Tivoli prototyping started in 1991 at Xerox PARC, the research prototype was commercialized in 1993 as a core application for the Xerox Liveboard, but research went on for several more years. Both the Liveboards and Tivoli are still around. Simply.com, Inc. purchased the technology and are now selling it under the "simply" label.

Tivoli allows users to treat the LiveBoard as a simple multi-page whiteboard that they can scribble on with electronic pens. Pen-based interaction in this context opens up new user interface techniques, such as gesturing and wiping. Being electronic, simultaneous whiteboard activity can be shared dynamically with connected Tivolis. The LiveBoard and Tivoli are part of a vision of ubiquitous computing in which computation "disappears into the woodwork" and thus integrates into normal work activities and practices.

The main question explored in the initial research was how to provide computer support to freehand drawing. The prevalent approach in the early 90s were to quickly transform the characters and forms drawn by the user into vectorized objects like letters, digit, boxes and lines. The assumption behind Tivoli was that computing could be utilized in many other and better ways, and the approach was to iteratively develop a tool that would carefully assess what would be helpful to the users and what would be getting in the way of their primary tasks.

Reference paper:

Elin Rønby Pedersen, Kim McCall, Thomas Moran, Frank Halasz:
Tivoli: An Electronic Whiteboard for Informal Workgroup Meetings. ISBN:0-201-58884-6, pp 391-398. This reference paper for Tivoli was presented at InterCHI 93 in Amsterdam. ACM Portal to Computing Literature, see http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=169309