Slashdot Mirror
Minority Report UI For The Military
merryprankster writes "New Scientist is reporting that a 'Minority Report'
style interface is being developed by defense company Raytheon. Users don a
pair of reflective gloves and manipulate images projected on a panoramic
screen. A mounted camera keeps track of hand movements and a computer
interprets gestures. Raytheon has even
employed John Underkoffler, the researcher who
proposed the interface to the makers of the film. Now just wait till Billboards start scanning your iris."
i wonder what viewing porn will be like with these new gloves.
When will it carve wooden balls?
I thought it was going to be an interface consisting of three psychic kids in tanks making all your decisions before you. That would be much more useful.
It has been being done for years by the film and video industry, albeit mainly not in realtime, but such places as the Liberty Science Center had interactive games that used contrasting colors to determine what the player was doing [they had basketball for sometime where you wore either a chroma-blue or chroma-green glove]
Video Production Support
Finally, a good explanation for the data-gloves Reeves used in the movie.
Shh.
I am way too clumsy to be trusted with one of these things. I have visions of my self slipping and dragging everything where it is not supposed to be dragged. Or something. Maybe I just fear change.
www.whitedust.net
The system under development at Raytheon lets users don a pair of reflective gloves and manipulate images projected on a panoramic screen. A mounted camera keeps track of hand movements and a computer interprets gestures
"Hand gestures, unlike a mouse or pointer, work really well when data is represented on wall-sized displays, for example."
And where in the field will this be used?
Am I the only one who gets scared when I imagine what a room in the pentagon might look like, with Generals wearing special glasses, and moving projected data off walls?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Raytheon is more than a defence contractor. They make alot of commercial electronics, including alot of marine equipment such as radar and radios.
A buddy of mine used to defend Windows Solitaire while in the Navy by claiming it was a clever interface training aid. That worked on every senior officer who complained about "playing games."
What "training aid" will ship with these gloves? Virtual handball?
Ooohhh...VirtualBoy on steroids!!
... personalised billboards will also be here soon, thanks to RFID in practically everything.
Dude, the psychics weren't an INTERFACE, they were the BACK END.
It's a Beowulf cluster of retarded psychic babies. Duh.
The advantage of using gloves is not to get a more intuitive, 3-D version of the mouse. The advantage to gloves is that you can have more than one (or two) pointers on a screen. Imagine using photoshop or some other editing software, and, instead of having to mouse around or hit keys to change tools, you just contracted a different finger. Touch typing is much faster than hunt-and-peck; why shouldn't the same be the case for graphical interfaces?
.. where to copy a file from one side of the room to the other, they essentially use a ***giant floppy disk***? Sure, it was a cool floppy disk, with live action video playing on it, but still... its a floppy disk.
You'd have thunk that by the time they had perfected 3D holography and VR manipulation, they could at least have kept up with some high-capacity networking. I guess not - floppys are the future!
Tomorrow's news today: Microsoft invites bloggers with high readership to dinner. Shows them previews of Minority Report style interface. Bloggers write gushing reports about it.
This will not be a technology with mass appeal, for the same reason as the light pen fad of the 1980s went nowhere: Humans just don't like holding their arms extended in front of them for long periods, it is very uncomfortable.
I have a (cool) Wacom Cintiq tablet, and, in contrast, it is completely bearable and even comfortable because it is (almost) horizontal when I use it. If I had to use it vertically like a 1980s home light-pen system for a C64 (which I am old enough to have used briefly...), my arms would be in constant pain by now.
Good. Now that they have that resolved, they can focus on the really important tech: "Sick Sticks".
No sig
In tech, we often find ourselves referring to the Hollywood Operating System. You know, the one where every key press makes a "click" sound, and passwords are cracked one character at a time (admittedly, something that actually worked against Windows 9x file shares).
I was actually impressed with the UI in Minority Report. I'm not saying it was necessarily perfect, but it wasn't obviously ridiculous either. There is a need to monitor information flows across many different sources, to simultaneously sense them, and to have the ability to integrate on demand. A large display with linkable data nodes is one approach that deserves further analysis.
Then you better try the Apple solution: it will only come with one glove.
I see this as being pretty exhausting after prolonged use. Perhaps if minute hand movements were translated into large gestures on the big screen... but that's what a conventional mouse does. I think the most revolutionary part would be to make "drag-drop" thing a lot more physical, i.e. add small amounts of inertia to dragged objects. Also, Google for the copy-paste pen device - really nifty stuff.
http://zero-to-enterprise.blogspot.com/
There is a reason none of these VR interfaces never go anywhere. The human body is not designed to hold it's arms suspended in mid-air for extende dperiods of time.
Try it yourself - stick your hands in front of the monitor, a bit below level with your shoulders. Feel free to move them around as if you are "manipulating".
Now, see how long you can hold them up there before your shoulders give out.
Now compare that to how long you can use a keyboard and mouse in one session.
It is not even in the same ballpark.
I get so lazy sometimes, that instead of leaning all the way up to the keyboard, I copy and paste letters to spell out words with the mouse, and you want me to USE MY ARMS!?!?!!?!!?
:)
I'll need to down a bottle of water just to get my computer out of sleep mode.
Gestures are a gateway interface
...but I believe that in Minority Report they were using OLEDs ie no projector. Wake me up when they have OLEDs in mass production, that is a lot more interesting.
John Underkoffler came from MIT's tangible media group
Seems like a good idea. I'd like to see a response from someone whom works with mo. cap. :)
"I thought it was going to be an interface consisting of three psychic kids in tanks making all your decisions before you. That would be much more useful."
I predict you will have a terrible typing accident, that'll leave us scared for life.
It's all wonderfully productive until some bozo offers to shake your hand while you're busy working, and you brush all your work off the screen.
the Nintendo Power Glove?
As much as I like Swordfish, I really dislike the horribly fake computer stuff in it...especially how Hugh Jackman types in code without ever having a prompt......
I wonder what congressional district the defense company is located in?
Raytheon has facilities in almost every state. They merged with Hughes a while back, and manufacture a wide variety of defense equipment, especially in the aerospace sector.
And where in the field will this be used?
The article says, in the field of satellite reconnaissance imagery. It'd be like using a mouse, except you can move more than one screen object at once with the fluidity of every day hand motions. Far more efficient.
Am I the only one who gets scared when I imagine what a room in the pentagon might look like, with Generals wearing special glasses, and moving projected data off walls?
Probably. Most men are made of sterner stuff.
Push/Pull
...So many more distinct gestures/commands are possilbe.
Slide/Spin/Twist
Grab/Grip/Grok/Associate
Wipe/Toss
I read a lot of Phillip K Dick and the interface portrayed in Minority Report was wonderfull.... not the goop-pool..... I'm refering to the the big screen Tom Cruise manipulated.... the goop-pool interface is the opposite extreme.
Nice story...original author highly recommended.
it makes me wonder. Which side are you on?
Hoppy Harrington says "Hi"gher
I've seen a lot of stupid ways of writing the plural form of "virus." A single apostrophe is probably the stupidest.
the Apple solution: it will only come with one glove.
Correction: a mitten.
-- Alastair
I didn't RTFA but...
The UI was one of the things I disliked most about 'Minority Report'. Seems to me it's a very inefficient interface...requiring large arm-waving motions to do menial tasks like moving windows. It makes for good Hollywood visuals but I can't imagine myself using something like this in a daily computing environment. On the other hand, maybe this is one way to make lazy programmers exercise.
On the surface, one of the apparent benefits of the Minority Report UI is it seems somewhat faster than today's mouse-driven interfaces. But given that the M.R. world has advanced retina scanning technology, why not design a UI around pupil-tracking? I can glance at a window much faster than I can point to it.
I wonder how accurate this would be. Would it even be really useful for first person shooters that require pinpoint precision? I would say no, but then again, I'm somehow fairly accurate with a mouse, so my hands can be accurate with training. I'm not sure about the whole arm bit though.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Have a look at HandVu for something that works right now.
I was planning on writing something similar to this (actually, very similar, same libraries and everything) but now may just build on top of the HandVu libraries instead.
Perhaps it was a security measure. An air gap, if you will. (Not to be confused with the "air gap firewall" marketing BS.)
After reading this, Mr. Cranky's review of Minority Report stands out in my mind. "After the balls roll out of the ramp, Anderton stands in front of a huge screen with his hands up in the air and attempts to masturbate imaginary pigeons. (Okay, I get what he's doing, but the idea that operating a computer 52 years from now will be something akin to air Kung Fu seems excessively stupid.)" ^^^^^ What he said.
Brain kills internet cells.
eom
...the NCO waving his arms (no general in his right mind is gonna use this, he's gonna sit in a chair and use a laser pointer to tell the NCO what to do) has to scratch his butt?
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
I think it's retna scan, not iris scan.
The one that gives you a blowjob while you code?
http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/research/applications /pits/
"We refer to the generated visualizations as Populated Information Terrains (PITS) to reflect the the fact that a key feature of this work is that these visualizations are intended to be multi-user applications in which the users are explicity embodied in the virtual environment and are thus visible to each other."
http://www.aalab.net/projects/maps/
"
The Map Is The Territory
visualizing on-line communities "
Specially if you sneeze in the most inappropriate moment.
Beiderbecke78@aol.com
this is an awesome website
where do i sign up?
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah zxcv!
Am I the only one to notice that they are using Mac OS X? I if look in the picture, the window containing the satellite photo, is defiantly from Mac OS X.
I'm all for this as a means of data manipulation, as long as they map the middle finger to ctrl-alt-del.
pr0n, of course. But submarine simulators and fighter jet simulators will be awesome. Memorizing keyboard mappings will be a thing of the past. There's a thousand different uses for this, above and beyone what Nintendo tried to do with the Powerglove (more lik powerflop, am i rite?).
Organic chemistry isomers and you'll have people with their own portable mini projectors to flip molecules around and stuff.
I can see where medical school students could use it for anatomy and pathology.
Pretty cool once it starts working well.
Now that's one nice, robust computing platform I'd like to leverage.
Of course, one who uses words like robust, platform and leverage will never use that sort of interface. *sigh*
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
"Push/Pullc iate
Slide/Spin/Twist
Grab/Grip/Grok/Asso
Wipe/Toss"
Also known as the chiropractor's best friend.
I agree with many other commenters that the hand-wavey interface makes better cinema than UI. I'd find it tiring too, and besides, if I want to scratch an itch on my body or something, I wouldn't want the computer to delete files or something. Being able to lose contact with the computer is handy.
But the comment about iris-reading billboards reminds me of what really scares me. That was a clever fictional technique in its day, but who needs it when there's RFID? You have a chip in your clothes, wallet, sneakers, EasyPass, SpeedPass, passport, or under your skin, and anybody can read who you are without the relatiavely tricky effort of reading irises. Big Brother's then able to find you, even if it turns out to be the same "personalized advertising" provider that reads the web cookies. (And has a feed into federal, state and local police.)
And remembert to turn the aGPS in their cellphone to "911 only"....
The system is not intended for widespread implementation at the current level. It's for accessing large amounts of information simultaneously. It's not about to be used in your average workplace, except maybe in high-priority design apps. I'm sad that it's being developed. I had thought up the idea a while back... All the good tech is being developed before I can get out of college.
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
...only comes with one glove...
Kinda like Michael Jackson....
In tech, we often find ourselves referring to the Hollywood Operating System
That's HOS for short. Compare it to the underwelming experience we have using our respective 'normal, every day' operating systems, which I will call Bitter Reality Operating Systems.
Time and time again, our experiences with Windows, Macintosh and Linux don't live up to the glamorized HOS we see on TV. I guess it's settled then... HOS before BROS.
Tovi Grossman, a grad student at UToronto, won best paper at UIST for developing a gestural, camera-based UI for actually building CAD models in a volumetric display from Actuality Systems. Click on the "video" for "Multi-finger gestural interaction with 3D volumetric displays."
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~tovi/
As other posters have pointed out, it would be difficult to hold your arms up for extended periods. However, if paired with good voice recognition imagine mostly talking with occasionally moving/adjusting objects.
Shh.
Well I guess this explains it - somewhere there is a tank with 3 kidnapped american kids who had a nightmare about weapons of mass destruction.... Now if only GWB would let us get our hands on the "minority report" for that one (checks nervously over shoulder).....
That's "on", not "with".
Yeah! The back end was running PHP.
Pretty Hot Psychic(s).
A Beowolf cluster of spider monkeys using these 21st century PowerGloves could do a better job then Bush.
... with the Minority Report user interface, all computer geeks will be as buff as Tom Cruise, and coffee in break rooms of software companies will be replaced by Gatorade.
But it will feel SOOO good when you put it on!
I seem to recall that during scenes in the film where the computer interface was being used the operators were physically passing back and forth what looked like large acrylic disks and inserting them into the drives. It was a strange dichotomy to see an apparently sophisticated interface coupled with such an archaic manner of data transport (i.e. sneaker net). It was as if the idea of local area network had not occurred to them (or perhaps not to the producers or set designers anyway).
Well, at least with the Apple version you can surf porn without, well, you know, ruining your input device.
omg roffle. yuo are funny!
That has got to be the absolute funniest thing I've ever heard on Slashdot! I applaud you, sir!
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
... when do we get the civilian version?
I've wanted something like this (or at least the Power Glove) since I first used 3dStudio MAX in 1997. Using keyboard and mouse to manipulate 3d space? I kept wanting to reach into the monitor and spin the mesh around. Very frustrating.
Seriously, the computer interface in Minority Report is probably the coolest damned thing I've ever seen in a movie, ever. First time CG has made my jaw drop since The Last Starfighter, and it did it by presenting a "proof of concept" of a system that will SERIOUSLY improve the way computers can be used.
Come on! Any real Mac user could tell you that a five-fingered glove plugged into your USB port would work just fine!
Isn't this what Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld have been doing for the president?
Is it backwards compatible?
If a billboard scanned my iris, it'd be the last iris it ever scanned. EVAR. (I'm not the only one who feels that way, right?)
[o]_O
For the movie, they purposely made it something very physical and visual so the audience could follow it. (Not everybody who sees movies is a geeky slashdot regular.)
...) takes more mental effort than putting them on a device you can hold in your hand.
Then again, a good interface is one that people can figure out, and I think it says something that people can easily figure out "drag onto this special platter, yank it out of this desk, plug it in that desk, drag it off the platter over there", even if they've never seen a computer or storage device that looked anything like that one.
Even if there is a technically faster way, how many people will do it this way because it's less mental effort? Surely you've known people who've copied some files to a {floppy,CD-R,USB thumb drive} to put them on the machine 2 meters away, because it's less mental load. Even if the network is set up, putting some files off in a purely virtual place (you have to name it, remember where you put it,
To access data on a (21st century) "floppy", you just need the floppy ("something you have"). To access data on a network, you need to know how/where to access it ("something you know"). Go read some Alan Kay stuff about the creation of the mouse: the mouse is great not just because it's efficient at pointing in 2 dimensions, but because it engages the physical/visual/spatial part of your brain. I hope creators of 21st century computers don't forget this lesson.
An 8 inch, single sided floppy disk? Aaah, the memories - uhh, nightmares...
I love the Power Glove... it's so bad.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
less so if you rest your elbows on the table. it's a lot like pottery, actually.
copyright © 2005 Flamsmsmark the ravings of a melancholly i
I remember that around the same time Minority Report came out there was an article (possibly on /.) about printing IC's on glass.
My thought was that the big displays and the small "floppy disk" displays were the actual computing equipment, and that you could cut it into small squares and still have part of the computing capability. Joining squares would combine them into a more powerful device.
You could measure the computing power in megaflops per square centimetre.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Well, you can implement cheaper and less robast hand-tracking camera system with little coding using open sourced Augmented reality system - ARToolkit. Put small ARToolkit markers on the gloves as described at this article (photo, and implement some gesture recognition (for example that one )
Where will they get the pre-cogs from?
Moving a million files from place A to place B will really gonna be a tiring job.
...and I thought working on computers take the least about of *physical efforts* as compared to *most* other professions.
Oook
I liked it even more when I saw it in the anime Martian Successor Nadesico long before...
At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we are implementing something we call the HI-Space table, which uses a camera to track hand motions as well. Ours doesn't need special gloves, though. You can walk up to the table and move your hands around and it watches any number of hands, doing any number of poses. It detects objects that are placed in the space and recognizes them if they are in the database. We have voice recognition, too, so it can respond to spoken commands.
One of the best things about our system is that it is completely untethered and intuitive. There is no training period, and no device to put on. You are interacting with the digital world by manipulating in the physical world.
I write applications for the table. There are a lot of issues that come up that you wouldn't normally think about. For example, with many hands in the space, it's easy to have people doing conflicting things. Actions are not so clearly defined, either. For example, when selecting a button, do you point to it? For how long? What if your finger moves a little?
We are currently conducting user studies to see in what ways the HI-Space table is better than the desktop and cave environments, and we're looking for other applications and organizations interested in using this technology.
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/hispace//
http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/hces//
contact me at bob [dot] baddeley [at] pnl [dot] gov
Stanley Kubrick was years ahead there by visualising computer hardware as glass-like slabs with no distinguishable metal portions, even for contacts. But of course he was aided by Arthur C. Clarke's brilliant innovative writing on the technology.
Funny how a lot of our ideas for technology (spaceflight, submarines, helicopters, etc.) all came from non-tech-career people.
I wonder if the smart ads will recognise the hand gesture command for not interested (i.e. fsck off).
Perhaps the short description here on slashdot is misleading, but I've seen systems with motion tracking using special gloves myself more than 10 years ago. Here's a big list of such or similar products.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
how soon they forget
It's been possible for a few years. The "hard" part is associating the cell phone's ID to the person, but the second you run a credit card through the cash register....
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
further correction: a cast.
You can't handle the truth.
you are such a pervert! Man, enough with the but licking jokes already.
You can't handle the truth.
I considered making a Minority Report style system using HoloPro Rear Projection Foil and one or two web cams.
If you are wearing reflective gloves, it should be easy to track the gloves movements. Using two cameras you could track the distance the gloves are from the screen and decided if any action should be taken.
I think this has already been done without the glove at some univerity somewhere.
-==-
er two mittens tied together by a string that you run through your coat sleeves.
Correction: a mitten.
Correction: an iMitten
-==-
The first Point and Click user interface was a .44
Colt
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Amen.
Gorilla Arm, according to Jargon
It's not the same the situation in the Jargon entry, but the net effort would be similar. Human arms aren't meant to be waved around unsupported, making precise movements for long periods of time. Consider also that if it's held above your heart, it has to do more to pump your blood against gravity.
Of all the movies to reference technology from, Minority Report must be the worst. There were so many continuity errors in that film it would be hard to know where to begin. That movie, along with A.I. pretty much sealed Spielburg's coffin and convinced me that I'd never pay another penny to see one of his movies.
I guess in the future, when you're a powerful law enforcement officer and you're fired, they don't bother to remove your computer security codes, which is what happened with Tom Cruise's character. He's breaking back into super-secure compounds with his access codes while he's a wanted man. I especially liked the scene where he carries around an eyeball in a zip-lok bag and it still manages to activate the retinal scanners. Worst movie ever!
<drmason> there was this one time I was wanking to porn... ... I kept a javascript tutorial open in another window so my parents didn't start wondering why I was always on the desktop with no windows showing
<drmason>
<drmason> so I'm just about to splurge when I suddenly hear my dad coming up the stairs
<drmason> alt-tabbed to the other window and tried to pull my boxers up... computer stalled JUST THEN as my dad was opening the door
<drmason> I just stood up and was like "fuck... dad this honestly isn't what it looks like"
<drmason> and he glanced at the screen and said "I sure hope so because it looks like you're masturbating to a fucking javascript tutorial"
Source: http://www.bash.org/?454203
Years ago HP made a PC with a touch screen that wasn't successful. HP concluded that while a touch screen was a cool idea, people got tired holding their arms up so long.
Think about musicians who perform and practice for hours with their arms in the air. It's hell to begin with, but later on 5-7 hours a day is nothing (well, not nothing, but very doable).
"I predict that in 20 years, computers will be twice as fast, take up a football field and will be so expensive that only the 5 richest kings in the world will be able to buy them!" "Will they be used for dating purposes?" "Yes! Mahey! but they will be SO accurate, they will destroy humanity, as they take away the thrill of the chase."
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
See the Nouse "Use your nose as a mouse", also reported here a while back.