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

Gorilla arm.

That is all I've got to say.

Check the jargon file if you don't understand this.

Re:gorilla arm

Well said... I thought this comic [ok-cancel.com] illustrated it well, also.

Comic is on topic

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 [kde.org]

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.

Re:Comic is on topic

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.

Nice

...but until it shows me the future I won't be *too* impressed.

Not impressive at all

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.

Re:Not impressive at all

Indeed, controlled with a Power Glove [wikipedia.org] no less.

Re:Not impressive at all

I love the Power Glove. It's so bad!

Re:Not impressive at all

Medicine, 3-D rescue mission/fire control mission planning, biology, CAD, art, anything with complex data sets, physics, movie editing, and 3-D movie creation come to mind. The intuitive 3-D control will allow whole new interfaces.

Re:Not impressive at all

In most if not all of those you mentioned having a 3d view would barely get you halfway there. The problem is you need to be able to TOUCH, I mean really touch, to truly interact. And that is where we really suck right now. Because all of the sensory feedback devices I have seen so far including the really high dollar still in the testing phase ones, really only give you soft/hard. They can't give you warm or slippery or squishy or cold or kinda bumpy or.....you get the idea. We humans pick up so much by touch that we simply don't realize, and when you cut us off from those sensations we can still work but not nearly as well.

That is why IMHO this stuff will never be more than kind of an "ooh cool" kind of expensive toy or for really really tiny niche roles until we can interface the brain directly. Because trying to simulate all the things we can gleam from simple touch would be just to insanely expensive to ever be practical. But if we can figure out a way to send the data to the brain directly, either by some sort of implant or perhaps through sensors on the scalp, then we don't HAVE to come up with a physical way to fake all this data, we can send it to the brain directly. It would also get rid of the "gorilla arm" problem as you wouldn't have to wave your arms like a maniac trying to work since you could simply manipulate the data with your thoughts, or even basic eye tracking.

Call me crazy, but I think that an interface controlled by the mind could really give us a great leap forward. Even typing this post think of how much faster it would be if my thoughts simply appeared on the page? I guess it is because all these oversized 3d interfaces just seem like overkill, like a holodeck. I know the Star Trek fans will kill me, but let us be honest: holodecks are dumb. You are wasting all that space and energy to give ONE person a little fantasy land to play in. That is really really dumb. When I saw the Voyager episode "Equinox" I thought THAT was what a holodeck would really be like. Instead of wasting all this energy trying to create a physical simulation to interact with just send the signals directly to the brain where they can be experienced with minimal power required.

Maybe it is just me, but I think this thing too is going overboard with trying to give physical interaction, when it is mental interaction that we should be striving for. But it does look like it would be fun to play with for a half an hour or so, or until your arms feel like falling off, whichever came first.

Re:Not impressive at all

Yeah but who would have thought that people would by teleconference rooms. I think it's a nice impressive toy, but someone with a lot of money (company money) is going to decide they need it to impress customers. I can already see someone swapping around Impress documents during a meeting. It'll happen, it'll make no sense, but it will happen.

Re:Not impressive at all

Agreed. These people are demonstrating something almost completely useless while I use a very traditional method - text entry via keyboard - to learn programming in a console. And I'm a 3D illustrator.

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."

Re:Not impressive at all

I claim that this will be great for gaming, i already want to make games for things like this, seeing this video does nothing to remove that.

I also think this expensive toy will be great for things that requires complex data to be handled fast.
That's what gestures are good for, complex objects, needing complex handling, instead of going into a menu->submenu->item, click.
They're nice in the same way as keyboard shortcuts, they reduce strain, but can't be used for everything.

Gestures are great for somethings and really poor for other things.
This system is partly a system for gestures,
partly a system of semantics of the various gestures,
and partly a system for using these things over an arbitrary amount of screens(dig about a bit on the website).

I think that for some uses this will be awesome, for others it won't work. Don't do programming or other text-centric things on this system.
I have no illusion that talking will ever replace typing.
Just like I don't think the Wii will replace me going outside to play soccer with my friends, Or that an OMNIMAX will stop me going to beautiful places.

Not a programmer, are you?

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.

Re:Not a programmer, are you?

I can't imagine a less efficient way to get any actual work done

tried Vista?

Re:Not a programmer, are you?

"Select Open parent this is p under score temp bar sex why z be be queue close apparent cheeses!"

Re:Not impressive at all

And while your 'free' hand is busy, what the hell is the image going to be doing?

Call me a luddite but I'll stick with 2D interface

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).

cheapscates

you mean to say, a startup centering around hi tech advances in visual interfaces.... can't afford to host their own demo? They have to go to the upscale HD version for YouTube to host the content?

Common. Get a real hosting account and a guy that knows how to embed JW to play your flash video.

Can you say.... gimmick?

Yawn... Another one of these. Why do I feel I read a /. article about "Minority Report interfaces" every week? And it would be interesting if we were talking about pre-cognitive interfaced etc. instead of the useless "do your best traffic officer impression" to move some videos around.
Yeah, IWTFV (didn't actually RTFA that came with it) and I guess it would be kind of cool for people who are not Real Geeks (TM). I especially enjoyed their "intuitive high bandwidth access to information" where they navigate this seemingly enormous 3D grid of what looks like boxes containing... the same japanese character! Yay, what a way to navigate through 2 bytes of info! Ok, maybe it is 1kb if the boxes were not identical, but there is no way to tell at a glance, as people who have tried to use lame 3D file managers would now. That scene also brought back fond cinematic memories... It's a Unix system! I know this!

The mouse is still better.

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'.

Wow! I want one

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.

Modern UI, I'm all for it

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!

Not from Minority Report

Actually, that idea first appeared in film in Johnny Mnemonic. [youtube.com]

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.

Re:Uh huh

The g-speak platform is in use today at Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities. Application areas include:

        * Financial services
        * Telepresence
        * Network operations centers
        * Logistics and supply chain management
        * Military and intelligence
        * Automotive
        * Natural resource exploration
        * Data mining and analytics
        * Medical imaging
        * High-touch retail
        * Trade shows and theatrical presentations
        * Consumer electronics interfaces

Oblong delivers room-sized and single-user g-speak environments as turnkey products.

A software development kit that runs on both Linux and Mac OS X is available. Applications are source-compatible across both operating systems and can run on ordinary desktop and laptop computers in addition to gesturally-equipped g-speak machines and clusters.

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