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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!!
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.
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
John Underkoffler came from MIT's tangible media group
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.
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 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
Seems to me it's a very inefficient interface...requiring large arm-waving motions to do menial tasks like moving windows
it is. But it wasn't designed to be a computer UI. It was designed to work with the thought-process of the user.
Have you ever stood up and walked to think? Ever wanted to guesture and put something on the wall?
It's a useful technology. Not one that you'd use next to your keyboard, but one that you'd use to direct a media stream or command a hundred distinct fire-teams.
The one that gives you a blowjob while you code?
Specially if you sneeze in the most inappropriate moment.
It has the advantage of scale. Moving macroscopic windows about on a desktop-sized screen, with many of them located in your peripheral vision, helps with your thought process. The movements, while not ideal for typing, are also normal, daily, real-world-sized motions, which don't requires as much of a mental shift. Since you're not trying to adapt to the unnatural one hand, 1-2 finger (depending on how many buttons your mouse has) interface, and can move freely, you're spending less energy adapting yourself to the environment, and have more mental power available for thinking.
We were just playing around years ago with a stereo wall, and I found that data was easier to visualize, and the gyromouse interface was more natural than a puck on a desk. On the other hand, this was still only one handed, and there are times that you wanted to be able to use the other hand for more operations.
The average office-drone isn't going to have this technology, but architects, doctors, scientists, etc, will take to it once the space/price issues for the screens get solved.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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.
A Beowolf cluster of spider monkeys using these 21st century PowerGloves could do a better job then Bush.
Well, at least with the Apple version you can surf porn without, well, you know, ruining your input device.
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