See-Through 3D Computer With Gesture Controls Gives Us a Glimpse of the Future 63
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."
Half cool (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Demos (Score:3, Interesting)
Pointless... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Gesture Computing Will Never Last (Score:3, Interesting)
Waving arms is generally tiresome and not all that effective.
But say, twitching a finger to flip through photos would be a lot easier then using a keyboard.
A better version of kinect that can turn on the TV and load that DVD at the slightest wave of your hand? Awesome! now you don't have to look for that clunky remote anymore.
However, this particular device with the screen in between the person and their hands, just awkward and plain ungainly.