Mimicking conversation in a virtual room required the Bell Labs teams to process multiple incoming video and audio feeds and handle superfast 3-D.
The Secretary highlighted the steps the Department of Energy was taking to encourage innovation, including including the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy and several Energy Innovation Hubs (nicknamed Bell-lablets) based on the storied Bell Labs innovation model.
Its founder, William Shockley, was fresh from winning the Nobel Prize (he had co-invented the transistor at Bell Labs in the 1940s) and was busy hiring the sharpest minds he could find to investigate the potential of semiconductors.
The abandoned Bell Labs are fighting for their existence, and CBS's somber granite tower stands in midtown Manhattan as an impressive marker of broadcasting's better days.
Lucent An awfully close second for the owner of Bell Labs, inventor of the laser.
The project (Bell Labs declines to disclose its cost) combined the work of physicists, app developers, signal processing experts and video engineers.
At the same time, C forged its own way in the world, moving from Bell Labs to the world's universities and to Microsoft, the breakout software company of the 1980s.
The geniuses at Bell Labs failed to see Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ).
If it is poised to better exploit the hidden value of its Bell Labs subsidiary, famed for such inventions as the transistor, then it's a cheap stock now.
"In the past we hired the best brains and let them figure out what to do, " says Arun Netravali, an electrical engineer who took the top job at Bell Labs in October.
In some ways, Google represents the internet-era equivalent of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC legendary corporate research outfits that shaped the evolution of technology in earlier periods.
The pavilion featured an immersive environment conceived by artists and engineers associated with Bell Labs who collaborated through the initiative Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT).
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Mr. SHURKIN: Well, he was a team leader at Bell Labs in the mid-1940s.
Back in 1952 as a graduate student, he spent a summer at Bell Labs, the intellectual hive known for cranking out Nobel laureates.
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Bell Labs stimulated the brain but offered little adrenalin.
But there is one area where Bell Labs, and many other corporate labs from the golden age of U.S. science, often floundered.
The fax machine was invented in 1843, and both Xerox and Bell Labs had ongoing projects to fine-tune the concept.
The first computer was created at the University of Pennsylvania and the first semiconductor was invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey, yet neither one was commercialized there.
It had spread across college campuses because Bell Labs started giving away the UNIX source code.
John Rogers, head of nanotechnology research at Bell Labs, reckons that the stamping approach will provide much higher resolution than is possible with inkjet printing.
Bell Labs created building blocks of the modern world--the transistor, Unix, laser breakthroughs, cellular telephony.
"It feels like the birth of a new industry, " says John Musser, the 45-year-old veteran of Bell Labs and Electronic Arts who runs Programmableweb.com.
Smell is among a number of electronic senses being developed at Bell Labs in New Jersey, the research arm of the U.S. firm Lucent Technologies.
"It feels like the birth of a new industry, " says John Musser, the 45-year-old veteran of Bell Labs and Electronic Arts (nasdaq: ERTS - news - people ) who runs Programmableweb.com.
It designed at Bell Labs and manufactured at Western Electric the phones and switchboards everybody used.
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In today's competitive telecom world Bell Labs is far more focused on the marketplace.
It was his rival, Joel Engel, who was head of research at Bell Labs and also committed to developing the first mobile phone.
Some years later, Claude Shannon (also of Bell Labs) would consolidate many of the prevailing ideas on the subject in his 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" which would reference the work of Nyquist significantly.
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