Oblong Industry’s G-Speak gesture-based interface offers one of the most advanced computer interfaces out there. All actions are directed by human gestures. It is completely frictionless: no touch screen, no keyboard, no mouse. Users wear special gloves with reflective balls on the finger tips whose movements can be read by infrared sensors. Essentially, you are composing data with pure air.
Earlier this week we posted on Gearlog about a Taiwanese researcher’s projected interface, which we alluded to as the closest yet to providing a true TCIMRE (Tom Cruise in Minority Report Experience). Boy were we wrong! G-Speak is the real TCIMRE deal. One of Oblong’s founders was even an adviser on Minority Report:
“Some of the SOE’s core ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong’s founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT. “
The full-room version of G-Speak seen in the above video utilizes several screens set up around a large room to completely embed the user (or users) in a world of pure information. The final product looks one-part Wii, one-part iPhone, and one hundred percent Tom Cruise.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Not yet anyway.
The tech looks really cool in the above video–as a good PR video supplied by the company on their official Web site should. But note that the users in the video are using very exaggerated gestures, which might indicate that the interface isn’t as instinctual or subtle as you might hope. According to one reviewer from New Scientist who got a hands-on experience, G-Speak is usable, but takes some “training” to get used to. Either way, the technology seems very promising, and we will see echos of this (and surely other hands-free operating systems) in the gadgets and computer interfaces of the next decade. This is just a taste of what’s to come.
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