Kinecting the Minority Report Interface
If you've seen the 2002 movie Minority Report, you know exactly what the "Minority Report
interface" is. In that popular scene, detective John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) and his team, in a race against time, worked on a transparent glass widescreen to browse and search through a collection of the precogs' digitized prophecies, supposedly containing visual clues that could lead to a crime that would happen at a specific time in the future. The plot seemed far fetched enough, but what really placed the audience in awe was the way Anderton was literally gesturing his commands to the computer. It was enough to tickle a lot of fancies and imagination. It was the ultimate inspiration for how we should be interacting with our computers in the future.
There are three significant user-interface design features to notice in that amazing scene:
Enter Microsoft's Kinect
. For some reason, Kinect was not closed to XBox 360. Thus, Kinect hacks abound soon after it hit stores in November 2010.
Kinect hacks from MIT showed computer navigations that are similar to g-speak but much simpler. In many news sites, it is referred to as the Minority Report interface as well. In their demo videos, you can see the user grabbing pictures and resizing them by simple gestures. Unlike g-speak which requires the user to wear a special pair of gloves, MIT's Kinect hack works with bare hands!
Although Kinect can easily work well for gaming controls, its adoption into mainstream computers would take some time until gesture standards could be pioneered and implemented. MIT's initiatives show how much spatial gesture can truly become the future of the user-interface. It's real! And it would just be a matter of time before we see them getting built-in to computers everywhere.
interface" is. In that popular scene, detective John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) and his team, in a race against time, worked on a transparent glass widescreen to browse and search through a collection of the precogs' digitized prophecies, supposedly containing visual clues that could lead to a crime that would happen at a specific time in the future. The plot seemed far fetched enough, but what really placed the audience in awe was the way Anderton was literally gesturing his commands to the computer. It was enough to tickle a lot of fancies and imagination. It was the ultimate inspiration for how we should be interacting with our computers in the future.There are three significant user-interface design features to notice in that amazing scene:
- Transparent glass monitors and storage media. Now this is still sci-fi but not far from becoming a reality. To date, there is no commercial product out that actually has this technology. Even in labs, there is also no true product of the same caliber. This is simply because transparent (or invisible) electronics are still under development. The closest we have is a prototype from Samsung which uses OLED.
- Multi-touch screens. Multi-touch screens were something new in the early 2000 although the technology has been in various labs far longer. Microsoft is one of the first to commercialize multi-touch when they released the Surface in 2001. A few years later, Apple and HP came out with the iPhone
and the TouchSmart
, respectively. Multi-touch screens became so popular since that almost all modern devices now have it. Of these products, the true multi-touch is Microsoft's Surface which can support up to 52 touch points (the limit was supposedly inspired by the number of cards in a deck) compared to two, three or five in most other devices to date.
- Spatial gesture recognition. Spatial gesture recognition was an existing technology in the MIT labs when Minority Report was being shot. Steven Spielberg's team sought the help of a team of geniuses under the supervision of John Underkoffler who is officially recognized as the inventor of the Minority Report interface. That interface is now a product of Oblong Industries, Inc. which they call g-speak. The result of the collaboration is an unforgettable scene that leaves a powerful message to everyone's mind: that the computer interface of the future just got to be spatial!
Enter Microsoft's Kinect
. For some reason, Kinect was not closed to XBox 360. Thus, Kinect hacks abound soon after it hit stores in November 2010.Kinect hacks from MIT showed computer navigations that are similar to g-speak but much simpler. In many news sites, it is referred to as the Minority Report interface as well. In their demo videos, you can see the user grabbing pictures and resizing them by simple gestures. Unlike g-speak which requires the user to wear a special pair of gloves, MIT's Kinect hack works with bare hands!
Although Kinect can easily work well for gaming controls, its adoption into mainstream computers would take some time until gesture standards could be pioneered and implemented. MIT's initiatives show how much spatial gesture can truly become the future of the user-interface. It's real! And it would just be a matter of time before we see them getting built-in to computers everywhere.
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