Oblong’s G-speak Points the Way to Tomorrow’s Interface
When I first laid eyes on Jeff Han’s next generation touchscreen interface, it gave me that tingle that told me, “Welcome to the future.” The same tingle I got when I saw my first command line interface in the late ’70s, or when I spotted my first GUI in the mid-’80s.
Oblong Industries’ newly available (after more than a decade in development) “spatial operating system“, G-speak, has turned that tingle into a burning itch. Nothing I have seen in tech innovation has made me as eager to live long enough to see it in my living room. Here’s a pretty stunning demo (via Slashdot), if you overlook that the operations performed don’t seem very useful, and just focus on the use of the space — what Oblong calls “The Luminous Room”:
The luminous room is achieved by what chief scientist John Underkoffler calls “gestural I/O” interaction with an I/O light bulb, a quaintly titled invention that sounds like it belongs in a steampunk novel. He writes in the unconventionally narrated company blog…
Ten years in, the GUI that’s taken over the world’s idea of interface isn’t getting at everything there is. Substantial swaths of human brain are dedicated to understanding space, understanding geometry, understanding physical structure. A cartoon of a messy desk surface doesn’t much tax these swaths. The swaths can work harder, ought to be made to.
Graphics should be able to go on floors and walls, which stay put, but also on tables, which only mostly stay put, and on chairs and clipboards and pets and people and all else that stays put rarely.
[…]
It acknowledges that people and objects and architecture all occupy one continuous space. But it also acknowledges that projected pixels end up in that same space. So in the Luminous Room, every pixel has real-world coordinates.
“Real-world pixels”: another of oblong’s attempts to redefine the visual and verbal language of the operating system. Mind you they’re not quite as ‘real world’ as those in the film Minority Report — for which Underkoffler served as science advisor and trained the actors to use the gestures you probably recognise — but the point is that the pixels are aware of where they are in the room itself, which puts this technology a leap forward from Jeff Han’s, and may mark this release as the first morning ray of the seminal paradigm shift above the GUI we’ve all been waiting for.
Software development kits for G-speak are said to be available for Linux and Mac OS X, although Oblong seems to want you to email them directly to inquire.
tony stark can already do this IN 3D
😛
Oh man! I sooooooo want that! 😯
And ya, when I first saw Jeff Hahn’s multi-touch display demos, I was totally speechless.
The Minority Report future is here!!!
Shitty…Johnny and Dave already stole my Tony Stark/Precogs mashemup joke.
This is epic.