That had never been done, says Stephen Benton, head of the lab's Spatial Imaging Group, where Lucente did his research. "Holographic video is one of the most long-term research projects at the Media Lab. . . . When Mark was here, . . . nobody believed it could be done at all. There were 20 years of received wisdom that it was foolish to try."

With a series of lenses and a supercomputer, Lucente and his colleagues modulated light waves that projected into space a golf-ball size 3D image of a Volkswagen Beetle. An observer turning a knob could rotate the image—the world's first interactive video hologram.

Even today, though, that technology is light years away from consumers. "Ten years from now will it be hard? No. You'll be buying novelty items, the equivalent of mood rings," Lucente says. He was more eager than that to bring his technology vision to real people.

His next stop was IBM, where in 1995 he ran his own research team at the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York. There, Lucente seized upon IBM's ViaVoice speech recognition software as a way to capture input from people "on their own terms." He then added gesture recognition for his memorable human computing demonstration at Comdex, which he called DreamSpace. Still, his inventions remained far from use by the general public. "I had some people telling me to focus on the farther out stuff, and then I'd have other people say, 'You know, it really helps loosen up the wallets if you can say and this can easily be part of IBM's product line in the next couple of years.'"

IBM had brought Lucente closer to real users than the Media Lab had, but it still wasn't close enough.

Meanwhile, in downtown Manhattan in mid-1997, Catherine Winchester (pictured), a Silicon Alley programmer-turned-entrepreneur, had started a company with a vision in sync with Lucente's. She showed investors a prototype "interactive expert" system that spoke aloud in a dialogue with users.

"The vision was that you'd be able to talk to the Web and hold conversations with it as if you were talking to real people," she says. The demo was an expert on Beatles music. Using a headset connected to a PC, a user could ask, for example, which song contained the lyrics "rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies." It would respond to the verbal query with a synthesized voice, saying "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and would then provide an onscreen list of albums containing the song—and let users hear it. "It was ahead of its time," she says. "People said, just give us a typing interface in natural language."

When Lucente came across Winchester's Soliloquy Web site in mid-1998, on which she explained her vision and her prototype, he knew he'd found his next home. He became Winchester's first full-time hire and CTO. Winchester and Lucente agreed that the only plausible beginning would be with a specific field of useful expertise. So while she was out raising capital from sources like the Genesys Angelbridge Fund and Gabelli Group Capital Partners, Lucente put together a team of brainiacs, including many of his MIT buddies, and reworked her prototype as a text-based tool focusing on notebook computers.