Gadgetory

I think that cinema is one of the great art forms and one of the great languages of obviously the 20th century and it's still serving as well here in the 21st century I think it's actually important to study cinema for anyone who's building you eyes anyone who's building anything and it was interesting the communication it's been ten years since the film Minority Report came out it is still the hallmark of the future of interface these people at oblong industries in Los Angeles they are the minds behind it they may the interface and they're building it and making your reality let's check out what they're doing as much as oblong is about products and technology it's about ideas and it's important to be expressing those in every form that it's possible to think of my name is John under Koffler I am co-founder and chief scientist of oblong when I first saw John's work it completely blew my mind and changed my view of what what you could do with a computer you can take the user interface and put it all over the room and you know make make the the interactive experience sort of part of people's real world not part of people's you know beige box is starting me in the kind of early 90s so barely a decade into modern UI based computer computing it seemed foolishly and naively to me that it was time for the next one right why why aren't we building the next UI 10 years seems like long enough and it seemed important to me that the that the UI was the focus of attention right because the UI at the end of the day is all we have do you speak as Minority Report made flesh this is a kind of typical installation of the sort that we've been providing to our early adopter customers like Boeing and GE for for many many years now and it's a kind of development system inside which you can solve problems that you can solve any other way you speak the platform is fundamentally input and output agnostic but in this case we're using motion capture sensors that are specifically configured to look for these little tags each tag has a unique constellation of retro-reflective dots so it's basically 3m scotchlite material and it allows the system to recover the identity and the the three-dimensional position and orientation of each finger it was an early revelation that the combination of incredibly detail position and orientation information with harshly quantized pose information makes a really really robust system that's what makes it so that it's user independent anyone can put on these gloves and immediately be using the system we don't have to train it per user and we went from command line computing to graphical computing and that was a big wholesale shift in and how you think about what it is to use a computer we are making that same shift happen for today from just graphical computing on one screen to computing that is multi-user multi screen and multi device so this is mezzanine this is a conference room collaboration product that we make care it oblong so what you're looking at is a shared workspace where we've got a collection of sequence content which is a slideshow that's what you're seeing in the the middle of the screen here a collection of assets that can be manipulated and added to the slideshow like this one where we've manufactured a set of three sided wand input devices which are used spatially to control our special operating environment so you use these things as handheld products to drag something in space from one screen to another or to manipulate an interface on one screen there's two ways to build out new technologies you can build kind of top-down the most capable possible version of the technology and starts out expensive or you can build bottom-up with inexpensive consumer class devices that are probably not that capable but get better and better every year we made a decision early on a table that we would build further for a while at least we would build top down so we would build the most capable systems we could imagine and we would rely on Moore's law and good engineering to sort of push those prices down here over a year is what we what we knew we would see is the cost curve and the capability curves intersecting I think we're right on the edge of that point and you can see that that intersection between the cost and the capability curves our goal now is to kind of push through that barrier and get our version our fully capable version of these spatial gestural multi user interfaces out to everybody so this is seismo and it's an earthquake visualization in sandbox there is no gloves involving this one right so this is usgs data and it sits about 128 thousand data points so as you're noticing you can you can sit here and just grab and interact with the data and there's a couple different ways that that we can interact with it so one is to just kind of grab it if we flip around we can set it back to kind of an equi rectangular normal world map do easily what was that I'm actually white so it's okay a reverse el yeah okay and I can just pull my fist and kind of move around correct all right let's go forward this is going back the operating environment thinks of role of pixels so you can put screens in your environment and basically use them as windows into a 3d virtual space as opposed to this kind of a continuation of a 2d space it's been interesting for us to watch the evolution of interfaces around tablets and phones because there's been a lot of interesting work from Microsoft and Apple and and and the Android vendors for us what all that works so far is missing is the idea that it's an anachronism to look at one screen at a time and you know view that as you're computing experience the next version of all of our computing experience is going to be multi screen and multi device we have all these powerful screens and all these pixels all around us all the time we need to use them more effectively so in the next year or so I think we're gonna see a huge kind of efflorescence of gestural and spatial input and more and more understanding among lots of different folks building computing experiences that multi-screen is really interesting oblong is dedicated to the idea that technology alone is no longer enough technology and design have to be conjoined have to be inseparable and have to be part of the same development process otherwise we're not going to get anywhere valuable at all