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See-Through 3D Computer With Gesture Controls Gives Us a Glimpse of the Future
silentbrad writes with this excerpt from Boy Genius Report:
"Some believe a future full of massive, gesture-controlled computer displays like the ones seen in Twentieth Century Fox's Minority Report are an inevitability, and a prototype PC designed by an intern with the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group may be among the first steps in making that future a reality. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D student and MIT Media Lab research assistant Jinha Lee recently set out to change the way we interact with desktop computers. While progress has been made with 3D display technology, 3D has not yet proliferated in the personal computing space and Lee wants to change that. The end result of his work is a fascinating desktop computer with a transparent 3D display and a unique gesture-based interface that could change the way we use computers."
Now we can have the blue cube of death!
Transparent screens still make me all fuzzy inside, but gesture based UI just doesn't interest me in the slightest. I want a UI where I have to move as LITTLE as possible. There was nothing on that demo that wouldn't have been easier with a mouse and a couple of mouse buttons more accurately, quicker and with less movement.
The Minority Report interface is cool because he's not doing work, he's creating a display for the audience. Hence, the only place I see gesture interfaces being useful is for Jobs 2.0 explaining why we should buy yet another incrementally better iPad, or Balmer showing how much Metro sucks for desktop use :)
Gestures as the main UI input will never last. They might work for a few things, like say doing a presentation. But no one will stand them for very long.
Stick your arms out. Now hold them there, for as long as you can. I'll wait.
.
.
How long did you last? Two minutes?
My hands sometimes get tired just using the iPad, at an angle.
There's zero benefit to transparent screens in the vast majority of use-cases, but there's a huge downside: loss of contrast ratio. In an era where contrast ratios as high as 10000:1 are achievable, why would want to go back to something as poor as 10:1 or even lower? The only use-case where transparent screens might be useful is vehicle heads-up displays, but even there it's not quite the right solution, because the focal plane is all wrong. Take a look at vehicles that do have HUDs: they all use reflection with an angled surface because it allows for the use of optics that projects a virtual display at a focal depth much further out than the surface itself. A display embedded into a windshield would appear fuzzy and out of focus if you look out at the road through it.
Most of the time, gadgets and technology in movies are designed simply to look cool, not for actual practicality, and the result is often pretty but stupid. The GUI in Minority Report is a great example of this: nobody can hold their arms up in front of them for more than a few minutes! Try it: get out a stopwatch and hold your arms out level for ten minutes. After the painful burning in your shoulders stops, take a minute and think about doing that for an eight hour workday. No matter how cool it looks, the mechanical advantage of our shoulders just isn't great enough to allow this kind of interface, and never will unless we all become cyborgs first.
Just because you saw something in a sci-fi movie doesn't automatically mean that it's the "future" and only the required technology developments are holding us back. It's not like script writers and directors have some sort of personal revelation of the One True Future that we must all aspire to.