Video: Getting Hard to Wave Away All These "Minority Report" Gesture Computers

Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Wednesday, Feb 17, 2010

Every week it seems we get a few hand waves closer to a world where we don’t have to click anything, just flick our wrists and wave our hands around, like Tom Cruise in Minority Report or figure skaters dancing through the Matrix.

The latest and perhaps realest step forward in the realm of lazy, mouse-free interfaces arrives courtesy of John Underkoffler, who happened to be working in the MIT Media Lab when the producers of Minority Report came through looking for face-melting ideas from four decades in the future. They hired him and his idea, and after the years-long, caffeine-fueled sloppy intercourse of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, he and his company Oblong have emerged at the TED conference with an actual spatial operating system.

Wave your hand in one direction, and you’re sliding through your tabs; wave it in the other direction, and you’ve Photoshopped Sarah Palin’s face on Alexander Hamilton’s head. The possibly already cybernetic Jennifer 8. Lee is on the case of our next next computer in the New York Times:

Mr. Underkoffler said this gesture technology was already being used in Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities, and he predicted that it would soon be available for consumers. “I think in five years’ time, when you buy a computer, you’ll get this,” he said.

He said, waving his hand at nothing in particular, probably sending a tweet about it at the same time.

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Alex_Pasternack

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New York, United States
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An enthusiast of science, technology and web surfing, Alex Pasternack has written about culture, politics and the built and natural environments in places as far afield as Sichuan, China, Ulan Ude,...