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."

Has potential (that's being wasted)

[menace3society]

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?

Gorilla arms.

[Anonymous Coward]

This will not be a technology with mass appeal, for the same reason as the light pen fad of the 1980s went nowhere: Humans just don't like holding their arms extended in front of them for long periods, it is very uncomfortable.

I have a (cool) Wacom Cintiq tablet, and, in contrast, it is completely bearable and even comfortable because it is (almost) horizontal when I use it. If I had to use it vertically like a 1980s home light-pen system for a C64 (which I am old enough to have used briefly...), my arms would be in constant pain by now.

Re:Where do the $5,000 toilet seats go?

[FredThompson]

The U.S. military has operated in 3 dimensions since the Civil War.

This might be useful in air combat control. There's got to be a limit to what can be conveyed on a flat computer screen or edge-lit piece of glass.

It might also be useful for detecting patterns in huge amounts of data. You've probably seen images where data is represented by a 3D projection. If you could manipulate the interpretation from inside, maybe you could see patterns more readily than from a fixed viewing point outside the system.

Besides, think of how fun it would be to play Populous with one of these and really "shoot" lightning bolts out of your fingers.

Pretty dangerous if you pick your nose or scratch your crotch, though, don't you think?

Because it is exhausting

[brunes69]

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.

"virus'"

[mnemonic_]

I've seen a lot of stupid ways of writing the plural form of "virus." A single apostrophe is probably the stupidest.

Re:Where do the $5,000 toilet seats go?

[YrWrstNtmr]

This appears to be wasteful spending.

Someone probably said the same thing about ARPANET.

I wonder what congressional district the defense company is located in?

Edward J. Markey [house.gov] (Ranking Democrat on the Telecommunications and Internet subcommittee)

Raytheon is based in Waltham, Massachussetts, but they have offices everywhere. Canada, Japan, Oz...
And they are Linux friendly. [prnewswire.com]

And where in the field will this be used?
One use might be a virtual sand table. Not everything the military does is 'in the field'.

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.
Generals don't move data. They direct Col's and Majors to do that.

Re:Do they also replicate the part of the interfac

[flonker]

Perhaps it was a security measure. An air gap, if you will. (Not to be confused with the "air gap firewall" marketing BS. [whalecommunications.com])

Re:Because it is exhausting

[Xzzy]

Given the sedentry lifestyles we live today, I'd think getting tired using a computer is good, both in the sense it burns a few more calories, and discourages extended periods of usage.

Re:Seems like an awfully inefficient UI

[Planesdragon]

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.

Re:Because it is exhausting

[Tlosk]

It is and it isn't. Anytime you try doing some physical activity you are unaccustomed to there will be an adaptation period where you experience fatigue and soreness. Once your muscles have adapted though you hardly notice it at all.

If you never take the stairs, try walking down 8 or 10 flights of stairs, the next day your calves will be thrashed, but if you do it every day you won't even notice it a bit.

Or try mixing concrete by hand, uber hard labor if it's not something you're used to, but run of the mill for people that do it regularly.

Holding your hands in the air isn't exactly hard labor lol, although I suspect we'd also do it standing just like they did in the movies, the kinematics of moving your arms and hands is very different standing than it is sitting.

Re:I'm Impressed

[WhatsAProGingrass]

Yeah, but if you watch carefully, they still need to transfer data onto a disk to get information from one computer 5ft away from the other computer. Blows my mind why they just can't do it wirelessly, or even have the computer's hard wired, they are so close.

Re:Seems like an awfully inefficient UI

[Frumious Wombat]

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.

Re:Wow - this technology is so new....

[Short Circuit]

The shape of your hand and, thus, how it interacts with things, can't be determined with just the positions of your finger tips.

For example, notice you can independently bend your second and third knuckes. (Counting from the fingertip, that is.) Each possibility leads to a unique shape.

I suspect the least uncomfortable system would be to have latex gloves with unqiuely-colored spots on key areas. Use a binary system with paints that only reflect at specific wavelengths, and create custom CCDs that detect on each of these channels. Reserve one wavelength for "invalid", to increase contrast between valid sensor spots and the rest of the glove.

Re:I'm Impressed

[1u3hr]

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).

Not to mention that text appears line by line on screen (slower than a PCXT) with a sound reminiscent of a line printer...

I was actually impressed with the UI in Minority Report.

I don't know why MR is getting the "credit" for this. It's hardly a new idea in academia; in fiction there's of course Neuromancer-style cyberspace (and and many others), and in movies 1995's Johnny Mnemonic (almost exactly the same) and 1994's Disclosure (full body immersion).

The latter reminds me of another element of the Hollywood interface: files are deleted line by line, or page by page, as you watch... and no one ever seems to have an offline backup, one copy is all there is.

Add voice too.

[headkase]

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.

Re:Where do the $5,000 toilet seats go?

[Ziviyr]

This appears to be wasteful spending.

Someone probably said the same thing about ARPANET.

ARPANET wasn't about replacing nimble control with sluggish/gross control or mimicking movies that involved lotto balls as a core element.

I really don't see much here that can't be done using a smaller finger controlled representation of the bigger one.

The arm waving thing is generally idiotic, like most Speilberg stuff...