ex-ORL projects

For 15 years the lab was one of the most innovative of its type in the world. Despite its small size, many of its projects became well known, including:

  • the Active Badge location system
  • the Pandora and Medusa multimedia environments
  • omniORB - a very fast lightweight CORBA implementation
  • VNC - a remote-graphics package installed on millions of machines around the world
  • the Broadband Phone - a thin-client next-generation communication system
  • the Sentient Computing project - taking context-aware computing to a new level
  • CLAN - the 'Collapsed LAN' - ultrafast interconnects
  • Piconet (later 'PEN') - low power embedded ad-hoc radio networks
  • DART - multimedia data retrieval

Several other projects were spun out as successful separate companies.

A book written by Frank Stajano, a former lab member, contains an illustrated overview of several of these projects. Frank has made the relevant pages of the book available for free as a PDF extract (1.5 MB).