Ranjit Makkuni, researcher in multimedia, active learning technologies, has been affiliated with Xerox Palo Alto Research Center since 1985. He holds M. Arch in Design Theory from UCLA, and B. Arch in Architecture from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

At Xerox Parc, Mr Makkuni's work was one of the first users of computing and video technologies to capture and support design processes. He later expanded his design activities and in 1986 he articulated a vision for the supportive use of multimedia technolgies in cultural learning. During 1987-1989 he conceived and directed the succesful, internationally acclaimed Electronic Sketch Book of Tibetan Thangka Painting Project, which was exhibited at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. He is currently leading the project Gita-Govinda, a collaboration between the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, New Delhi and Xerox Parc to build a multimedia exhibit based on the traditional multimedia art form, the Gita-Govinda, a 12th century love poem expressed in painting, music and dance.

Makkuni's work marks a strong departure from the traditional text-based approaches common to computer interaction, and has been exploring multimedia interaction techniques that are non-textual, through gestures, sound, and movement browsing technologies. In 1985, he built a completely gesture-based, keyboardless computing system. Makkuni holds a patent for the gestural retrieval of multimedia databases. He is also co-inventor of Hyperpaper, a paper-based multimedia system that exploits the aesthetics of paper and multimedia media.

Ranjit Makkuni also serves on the editorial board of the Visual Computer, an international journal of Computer Graphics, and on the Program Committee, IFIP Conference on Visual Database systems.

His publications include:
'A Diagrammatic Interface to a Database of Thangka Imagery' in: Kunji, T.L., ed., Visual Database Systems, North Holland, Tokyo (1989)

'The Electronic Sketch Book of Tibetan Thangka Painting' in: Visual Computer 5 (1989)

'Museum of the Future, N-Dimensional Art: The Project Gita-Govinda' in: Art the Integral Vision: a Volume of Essays in Felicitation of Kapila Vatsyayan, D.K. Publishers, New Delhi (1993)

Museums, Multimedia and Cultural Learning, Panel ACM conference on Multimedia '96, San Francisco (1995)

Hyperpaper and Active Learning and Multimedia Proceedings of the Multimedia '96 New Delhi, IETE, New Delhi (1996)

http://www.parc.xerox.com