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Oblong's g-speak Brings "Minority Report" Interface To Life
tracheopterix writes "Oblong Industries, a startup based in LA has unveiled g-speak, an operational version of the notable interface from Minority Report. One of Oblong's founders served as science and technology adviser for the film; the interface was an extension of his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab. Oblong calls g-speak a 'spatial operating environment' and adds that 'the SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.'" The video shown on Oblong's front page is an impressive demo.
Actually, that idea first appeared in film in Johnny Mnemonic.
Autodesk put considerable effort into virtual reality in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The hope was that it would make it easier to design 3D objects. It didn't. The fundamental problem is that positioning your hands precisely in free space by eye, not touch, is slow and inaccurate. It looks really cool, but it's like trying to do precision work wearing mittens. Humans are much more precise when they have a surface to work against.
It's not a technology problem.
This is his website. But I' have no idea what medium he used for any of his drawings there... Suffice it to say I wouldn't be surprised if it was drawn via the mouse. He was that good with it.
Stupidity is its own reward.
The g-speak platform is in use today at Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities. Application areas include:
* Financial services
* Telepresence
* Network operations centers
* Logistics and supply chain management
* Military and intelligence
* Automotive
* Natural resource exploration
* Data mining and analytics
* Medical imaging
* High-touch retail
* Trade shows and theatrical presentations
* Consumer electronics interfaces
Oblong delivers room-sized and single-user g-speak environments as turnkey products.
A software development kit that runs on both Linux and Mac OS X is available. Applications are source-compatible across both operating systems and can run on ordinary desktop and laptop computers in addition to gesturally-equipped g-speak machines and clusters.
You were saying?
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
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Correct me, but are all these breathless announcements still vapourware?
I'm getting a bit tired of this bullshit. It was just a stunt, it looked cool but completely impractical. And it's not like "Minority Report" (2002) actually invented the idea, even in the movies. Off the top of my head, same concept was used in "Johnny Mnemonic" (1995), Disclosure (1994), "Hitchhiker's Guide" (1978 (radio version)).
You can kind of do this on the Linux/BSD console but it's more limited. I'm looking for something like the text console but for the GUI and where you get to pick your "working set" of 9 or so windows from as many windows you have open.
Sounds like a combination of Spaces and Exposé fits that bill exactly. KDE already has the multiple virtual desktops, and I'm sure there's some Exposé clone for Linux out there somewhere.
Using datagloves, I did quite a bit of work in 1993 to see how the sort of UIs that we see in the Minority Report could work.
It turns out that there are 2 issues to overcome:
- Fatigue: the gesture vocabulary had to consist only of short sequences.
- "immersion syndrome": whatever I do can be interpreted against my will.
By designing the gesture vocabulary so that it would require alternating tense postures and relaxed aiming gestures, it was possible to overcome those issues in a pretty satisfactory way. Tension is particularly important, as it conveys intention: if you stress "Go There", people (and machines) can detect the fact that you want something to happen, as compared to using a monocord voice.
see Charade: Remote Control Of Objects Using Free-Hand Gestures published in Communications of the ACM in 1994 for more details.
-- ... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme. D. Adams, The hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Chap. 2. 1979.
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive
Try nigh-impossible.
Ignore the dorky gestures and focus on the 'real-world pixels' -- pixels that are aware of not only their coordinates on a digital surface, but also their coordinates in the room at large. This is the big leap forward here, not all the arm-waving. Try to see the whole, bud.
Does anyone remember this? I pretty sure my dad had a camera that did this. A Nikon if I remember correctly...which I usually don't.
Ah, found it in Canon EOS