Steven Spielberg's 2002 film, Minority Report, featured futuristic technology and computer interfaces. The advanced digital technologies that are shown in the film have introduced new realms of possibilities to the digital community. Spielberg's conceptual vision is serving as a source of inspiration for computer programmers all over the world.
Oblong Industries, a company based in Los Angelos, CA, is the developer of g-speak spatial operating environment, aka SOE. Some of SOE's core ideas bear resemblance to the Minority Report technologies. The similarity is no coincedence. One of Oblong's founders served as a science advisor to Minority Report and based the designs of those scenes in the film on his earlier work at MIT. The impressive technology shown in Minority Report is already making its way into academia. From academia, into popular cinema, and out broadly into the world as commercial product, g-speak has the potential to alter human/computer interface.
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
I find it fascinating that science fiction, films, and futuristic art spur technological designs. It takes a team effort to produce the finished product, and the initial inspirations come from a wide variety of sources. The visionaries conceive ideas, but it is the producers and programmers who take those concepts and hone them until they get results. Visionaries give the programmers something to shoot for, and the programmers produce actual digital media.
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