Oblong's g-speak Brings "Minority Report" Interface To Life 221
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.
Re:gorilla arm (Score:5, Interesting)
Well said... I thought this comic [ok-cancel.com] illustrated it well, also.
Wow! I want one (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not impressive at all (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you kidding me? This is the future interface of parallel programming, among other things. Rotate'm, push'm, pull'm, drag'm and drop'm. This technology will allow us to walk inside or fly through our programs and quickly create and/or modify them through trial-and-error. Kinda like the way an interior decorator might rearrange the furniture and colors on the walls. This is the beginning of the end of keyboards and mice and typing. Add a voice recognition interface and this shit is going to kick ass. It will turn users, gamers and developpers into magicians.
Anyone remember that OCZ mind controller thing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Implementing a Good(tm) product, and getting a market for it is a whole different story. I would expect to see this kind of thing first coming to market as a expensive niche product for CAD/VR visualation set ups, or perhaps being bundled with a game that supports it. Many of these new things never get off the ground, not at least until the price/performance ratio reaches a point it becomes compelling.
Anyone remember that direct mind controller thing from OCZ? No? This'll be forgotten too...
Re:Not impressive at all (Score:5, Interesting)
People keep harping about 3D visualization being the next big thing, but while these awkward, hammer-seeks-nail inventions come and go, simple things like the classic terminal are *increasing* in popularity, if anything. New Linux users and experienced Mac users are saying things like, "actually, I just use the terminal to do such-and-such a task; it's faster that way."
I have used it, and it is impressive (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Uh huh (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Call me a luddite but I'll stick with 2D interf (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't forsee this technology being used on personal home computers in the near future.
Where I do anticipate (and look forward to) seeing it is for interactive public displays. It would be a very cool interface to have for a 3d map and directory in a mall or an informative display at a museum or aquarium.
As for home use, it could be used for family gatherings and birthday/wedding parties. Set it up with your DJ software and photos, then let your guests check out photos, pick out music to play, etc.
Most wedding parties, etc have a slideshow going on, why not let your guests upload photos as they take them, add them to the slideshow, maybe browse through them manually, change the background music, etc. It could make for a very entertaining and rewarding device to have for such occasions, even if you just rented them out.
Re:Not impressive at all (Score:2, Interesting)
However, I too was thinking about my love of the command line. Basically, as they claim, 2D interface came along in 1984. It basically still has a lot to be worked out to make it useful. I do prefer point and click for many things there the command line options are just too complicating. It's easier to cut and paste 5 random files from one place to another than to find some common search thread between them all or to type it all out... Basically only simple things work well this way.
So the irony is that - it takes a long time to make a GUI useful, it will take longer to make a 3DGUI useful, and we've really only been able to work out the simpler applications (moving files, grouping non-text similar things) so it's like this technology will be only useful for very simple tasks for a long while yet... All the new and advanced stuff is likely to stay only really efficiently done via text commands. So the new fancy GUI will serve up old simple solutions. Probably the making of the complicated fancy GUI will be all accomplished using command line text =)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not impressive at all (Score:2, Interesting)
not that i post that much here, but - this is the coolest thing iv/e seen in ages. *not that it applies to us as programmers*, but it does to our users. yes, i use terminal on my imac for programming, but not for seeing the result. i think someone out geeked the geeks here...
Re:Not impressive at all (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Comic is on topic (Score:4, Interesting)
You would be surprised at how hard it is to keep your eyes steady. Unless there were an easy way to turn it on and off, you'd find your cursor jumping around quite a bit.