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.

Comments

gorilla arm

[Anonymous Coward]

Gorilla arm.

That is all I've got to say.

Check the jargon file if you don't understand this.

Not impressive at all

[avalys]

Actually, I call that an extremely unimpressive demo. It is a lot of technology with little purpose. In that entire video, what are they doing? Just spinning a bunch of pictures around.

Without a compelling application that requires that interface, it's a just a big, expensive toy.

Re:Not impressive at all

[Iamthecheese]

Medicine, 3-D rescue mission/fire control mission planning, biology, CAD, art, anything with complex data sets, physics, movie editing, and 3-D movie creation come to mind. The intuitive 3-D control will allow whole new interfaces.

Re:Not impressive at all

[Xiph]

I claim that this will be great for gaming, i already want to make games for things like this, seeing this video does nothing to remove that.

I also think this expensive toy will be great for things that requires complex data to be handled fast.
That's what gestures are good for, complex objects, needing complex handling, instead of going into a menu->submenu->item, click.
They're nice in the same way as keyboard shortcuts, they reduce strain, but can't be used for everything.

Gestures are great for somethings and really poor for other things.
This system is partly a system for gestures,
partly a system of semantics of the various gestures,
and partly a system for using these things over an arbitrary amount of screens(dig about a bit on the website).

I think that for some uses this will be awesome, for others it won't work. Don't do programming or other text-centric things on this system.
I have no illusion that talking will ever replace typing.
Just like I don't think the Wii will replace me going outside to play soccer with my friends, Or that an OMNIMAX will stop me going to beautiful places.

Call me a luddite but I'll stick with 2D interface

[syousef]

I really don't want an interface where I have to gesticulate at a computer, while repeating words so the speech recognition engine picks them up correctly and moving cursors around with my eyeballs. Hell I don't even want 3D desktops and transparent windows - take all the damn effects away, and leave me with the folder metaphor, current UI for editing text and pictures, and a command line. These interfaces don't give me any new capabilities, and anything that requires more effort and doesn't empower the user is a waste of time. They aren't revolutionary - they're not even good sci-fi. They don't belong to the future, because the future will be built on interfaces that are MORE not less convenient and do actually give new capabilities. Good sci fi are things like the star trek communicator (not so different to today's mobile phone, or a walkie talkie of old, and were used to enable the characters).

Can you say.... gimmick?

[Ecuador]

Yawn... Another one of these. Why do I feel I read a /. article about "Minority Report interfaces" every week? And it would be interesting if we were talking about pre-cognitive interfaced etc. instead of the useless "do your best traffic officer impression" to move some videos around.
Yeah, IWTFV (didn't actually RTFA that came with it) and I guess it would be kind of cool for people who are not Real Geeks (TM). I especially enjoyed their "intuitive high bandwidth access to information" where they navigate this seemingly enormous 3D grid of what looks like boxes containing... the same japanese character! Yay, what a way to navigate through 2 bytes of info! Ok, maybe it is 1kb if the boxes were not identical, but there is no way to tell at a glance, as people who have tried to use lame 3D file managers would now. That scene also brought back fond cinematic memories... It's a Unix system! I know this!

The mouse is still better.

[wild_quinine]

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.

I'm tired of hearing about all these things that will replace the mouse. The mouse will be replaced one day, but not until something comes out which is better, not merely cooler.

This minority report interface will tire your arms out in less than five minutes. I'm embarrased to admit it, but I use a computer for upwards of eight hours a day. Sometimes upwards of twelve.

The mouse is ideal in that your fingers have precision, the feel of pointing is natural, and crucially your hand, wrist, arm, are all more or less at rest throughout the process. Sure, you move them. But you don't hold them anywhere. It's a fundamentally different type of task from minority reporting, or wii-ing, or other stupid-but-cool flailing systems.

So no, I don't know what will replace the mouse. Something, eventually. If I knew what it was, I'd make a bloody fortune. But improving on the mouse will take a damn shot more work than making me say 'Wow', let alone 'meh'.

Re:The mouse is still better.

[NfoCipher]

That's the old fart talking. We've been using a mouse most of our lives, so sure it's better for us. Take a look at the wii, it took me a while to adjust killing zombies by pointing at the screen instead of using my thumb.

If kids growing up use this interface, not only will it be natural to them, they'll be in much better shape.

Re:The mouse is still better.

[wild_quinine]

That's the old fart talking. We've been using a mouse most of our lives, so sure it's better for us. Take a look at the wii, it took me a while to adjust killing zombies by pointing at the screen instead of using my thumb. If kids growing up use this interface, not only will it be natural to them, they'll be in much better shape.

The wii's controller is unreservedly terrible. The only thing it's good for is amusement. If kids grow up using that interface, I'll be surprised if they can open 'My Documents' by the age of thirteen.

I'm sorry, but waving your arms around and working an office job are just mutually incompatible unless you're a manager.

I look forwards to something bettering the mouse, just as I look forwards to each new technological advance. I don't buy into stuff because it's cool, which is where the kids go wrong. I buy in when something is better.

Not a programmer, are you?

[Namarrgon]

I can't imagine a less efficient way to get any actual work done :-(

Apart from the arm strain, I think that saying, "if open-parenthesis p-underscore-temp-var-x-y-z-b-b-q close-parenthesis newline open-curly-brace newline temp-var-x-y-z-b-b-q equals asterisk p-underscore-temp-var-x-y-z-b-b-q semicolon newline close-curly-brace newline", more than, say, once, would engender homicidal rage.

Re:Not a programmer, are you?

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

Oh, come on, how is this insightful? Since when is "actual work" equivalent to typing code? Just because something is not useful for one purpose does not make it useless. I don't think anyone even suggested that this is cool for coding or that all input devides should be replaced with this one. Sorry, but your comment is so narrow-minded that I would consider it "troll" rather than "insightful".

Comic is on topic

[TheLink]

How's the comic offtopic?

Back in my school days, one form of _punishment_ was being made to hold your hands up or out for many minutes. Imagine if you had to keep your arms extended for so long - talk about asking for a new set of RSI problems.

The full 3-D gesture stuff is overrated.

What would help me a lot more is the ability to quickly switch to a particular window in mind:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121349

Even if you don't have all your windows maximized, it would save a fair bit of time. Alt-Tab only works well if you are switching between two windows.

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.