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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.
Gorilla arm.
That is all I've got to say.
Check the jargon file if you don't understand this.
...but until it shows me the future I won't be *too* impressed.
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.
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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).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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'.
I want one! I will disagree with everyone here saying that it's useless. I'd trade the mouse, and pen tablet, and the joystick, and all the rest of those for this. Looks way more convinient - not to mention instinctive - to use. It's like a touchscreen but you don't have to leave greasy fingerprints all over. With this I could even actually draw on computer, while so far any attempts with mouse just ended up with wrist pain and frustration. And just moving the cursor, moving windows, anything... Oh, and games, this will send Wii to an antique museum.
I think Linux isn't better than Windows hence in the slashdot realm I'm a troll
Besides, I am still having hard time operating this mouse foot petal. It is so damn hard to get the selection of a word with my toes! Next thing you know, they'll design away my CD-RW coffee cup holder! I still miss my D parallel printer, what am I going to do with all the cheap cables I got at the discount bin at BestBuy!
It is not just a gimmick - they have worked on the gestural language as well as translation software, and it works well. The glove is a bit of a bummer, but it is just a passive glove with spots the system can read. They already have clients, yes big data sets of SHARED computing environments, something that is being overlooked. But it will be quite some time before we have it on our laptops, probably on our TVs before that. And, yes, it will be a better UI than the mouse or accelerometers or voice for many things. But the future is a mixed environment not one single solutions.
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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
OK, maybe this is the wave of the future. I will not say it isn't - but that promo didn't sell it. It looked like what they claim to be - based on a Hollywood custom script. I want to see how I would use this in the real world - I'm not going to be standing around and moving those text blocks around, nor did I really see why having that matrix of Asian language characters (I don't know which language - I can't read any of them) in that grid would help someone deal with the massive amount of letters anyway. It seems to me since most of them are based on pen strokes that that the arrangement is - hmm - only made to be visual appealing to westerners (which I am one of).
I had used an SGI CAVE a few years back for a few different things (well, others in the group I worked with wrote the stuff - I played with it simply because it was neat) and I see many similarities. Given that products history I do not see that as a Good Thing for them. In fact they seem to be a good 5-10 years behind the curve - the last time I used one was five years ago and they were already doing all this nice stuff from what I can see.
It was really good for things that were meant to be visual. For instance they had this really neat data set of a human (some convict that donated their body to science) and you could interact with a 3-dimensional representation of them. Their body "displayed" (or rather appeared too) in the center of the CAVE and then you could select (using a wand that the system kept tract of it's position in the room) a "window" and move/drag it around and see just that slice of the body in a high amount of detail. You could lock that and have as many 2-d slices going through the body as you want.
They also had a car wreck that you could do a similar thing - but you watched the "slice" as the wreck happened in real time. They actually crashed a car to get the data.
There were also quite a number of specialized tasks that benefited from it and I still run into some today.
But, other than that we pretty much played quake on it. Why? Well most data doesn't really need that type of visual representation. Our current screens work quite well and you are simply adding overhead for the heck of it. Even for those that the system worked well for they still did OK on a normal screen. A large monitor costs a few thousand, these systems cost a few hundred thousand. Well, you should get the picture there (and knowing that I worked in a govt research lab at the time should tell you why no one cared that it was a few hundred thousand more).
This system has the 3-d input but not the nice 3-d output that the SGI systems had so I can't see it working any better - it is just as specialized hardware intensive and I bet just as expensive. Even if it isn't - is the increased productivity for those specialized application going to be worth the cost? I also bet not.
You will note that even a group that has quite a bit of experience making true Hollywood scenes couldn't come up with better. Perfect for massive data - uh huh - and what did that wonderful things you show of arcs moving around *really* give you? You mean where you put a circle over one of the other circles and it turned yellow?
Is there *any* reason whatsoever that the majority of that could not be accomplished with a mouse and a large LCD? Nope - so why purchase this? At least the pretty much failed SGI stuff had the whole 3-d output to go with it - and trust me, there is no experience in the world like playing quake in a fully 3-d environment that you are freaking standing in the middle of and the virtual gun actually is being held by your hand. But then - how many are going to pay 250k for that?
This type of thing is so 1990's and dot com - ten years ago these guys would have been flush with cash from countless venture capitalist. Heck, their video even screams late 90's and early 00's. As is they better really be able to back up the claims they make to even have a shot at it, let alone be truly successful. I didn't particularly see anyt
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
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.
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.