Candace Lombardi
Remember the Minority Report scenes in which Tom Cruise and others used their hands to manipulate data on giant computer screens?
One man is on a mission to make that gestural interface technology commonplace on every desktop.
John Underkoffler, the founder and chief scientist of Oblong Industries, gave a talk called 'Cinema, Science and Innovation' on Friday night at the Museum of Science in Boston.
"The mouse has had a good run but its time to say good-bye," said Underkoffler.
His company has an operating system, based on human-hand gesturing, that allows the user to explore in a 3D plane. The system responds to the pitch, roll and yaw movements that come naturally to the hand and works with cameras that track the positions of targets placed on gloves.
"We really want to get this on every desktop, and that's what we are going to focus on doing until we either go out of business or [until] the next plane trip you take, the woman sitting next to you opens up her laptop and starts doing this," said Underkoffler, gesturing with his hands.
Underkoffler was inspired by his work as the science and technology advisor to Steven Spielberg for the film Minority Report. The team created the futuristic Washington headquarters portrayed in the film. When it came to the gestural interface, the production team's research and development came just shy of actually building it, according to Underkoffler.
"What had started in an academic environment, passed through the Hollywood environment and back. Which means it's just like the movie, but it really works -- which is really better," he said.
Famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Bill Mitchell, director of the Media Lab's Smart Cities research group and Underkoffler's mentor, said he was not surprised.
"Of everyone I know, John has the most profound understanding of how imaginative projectionism of the future in film affects real-life expectations of the future," said Mitchell as he introduced Underkoffler, who received his PhD from MIT.
"Sometimes the filmmakers -- the science-fiction writers -- imagine stuff before the engineers do, and there is a feedback loop between fiction and science that seems to be influencing each other," said Underkoffler.
Oblong could create applications for air-traffic control or for groups visually disseminating large and complicated data sets. Microsoft also been experimenting with gestural interface through its TouchLight technology.
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