 I think that cinema is one of the great art forms and one of the great languages of obviously the 20th century and it's still serving us well here in the 21st century. I think it's actually important to study cinema for anyone who's building UIs, anyone who's building anything, anyone who's interested in communication. It's been 10 years since the film Minority Report came out. It is still the hallmark of the future of interface. These people at Oblong Industries in Los Angeles, they're the minds behind it. They made the interface and they're building it and making it a reality. Let's check out what they're doing. As much as Oblong is about product and technology, it's about ideas and it's important to be expressing those in every form that it's possible to think of. My name is John Underkoffler. I am a co-founder and chief scientist of Oblong. When I first saw John's work, it completely blew my mind and changed my view of what you could do with a computer. You can take the user interface and put it all over the room and make the interactive experience part of people's real world, not part of people's beige box. Starting in the early 90s, so barely a decade into modern UI-based computing, it seemed foolishly and naively to me that it was time for the next one. Why aren't we building the next UI? Ten years seems like long enough. It seemed important to me that the UI was the focus of attention, because the UI at the end of the day is all we have. G-Speak is minority report made flesh. This is a kind of typical installation of the sort that we've been providing to our early adopter customers like Boeing and GE for many, many years now. It's a kind of development system inside which you can solve problems that you can't solve any other way. G-Speak, the platform, is fundamentally input and output agnostic, but in this case we're using motion capture sensors that are specifically configured to look for these little tags. Each tag has a unique constellation of retro-reflective dots. It's basically 3M scotch light material, and it allows the system to recover the identity and the three-dimensional position and orientation of each finger. It was an early revelation that the combination of incredibly detailed position and orientation information with harshly quantized pose information makes a really, really robust system. That's what makes it so that it's user independent. Anyone can put on these gloves and immediately be using the system. We don't have to train it per user. We went from command line computing to graphical computing, and that was a big wholesale shift in how you think about what it is to use a computer. We are making that same shift happen for today from just graphical computing on one screen to computing that is multi-user, multi-screen, and multi-device. So this is Mezni. This is a conference room collaboration product that we make here at Avalon. So what you're looking at is a shared workspace where we've got a collection of sequence content, which is a slideshow. It's what you're seeing in the middle of the screen here, a collection of assets that can be manipulated and added to the slideshow, like this one here. We've manufactured a set of three-sided wand input devices, which are used spatially to control our spatial operating environment. So you use these things as handheld products to drag something in space from one screen to another or to manipulate an interface on one screen. There's two ways to build out new technologies. You can build kind of top down the most capable possible version of the technology and it starts out expensive, or you can build bottom up with inexpensive consumer class devices that are probably not that capable but get better and better every year. We made a decision early on at Avalon that we would build, for a while at least, we would build top down. So we would build the most capable systems we could imagine, and we would rely on Moore's Law and good engineering to sort of push those prices down year over year. What we knew we would see is the cost curve and the capability curves intersecting. I think we're right on the edge of that point and you can see that intersection between the cost and the capability curves. Our goal now is to kind of push through that barrier and get our version, our fully capable version of these spatial gestural multi-user interfaces out to everybody. So this is Seismo and it's an earthquake visualization in sandbox. There is no gloves involved with this one. Right. So this is USGS data and it's about 128,000 data points. So as you're noticing, you can sit here and just grab and interact with the data. And there's a couple different ways that we can interact with this. So one is to just kind of grab it. If we flip around, we can set it back to kind of an equirectangular normal world map view. I'm actually going to wind. So it's just a reverse L. Yeah. Okay. And I can just hold my fist and kind of move it around. Correct. All right. So this is going forward, this is going back. The operating environment thinks of real world pixels. So you can put screens in your environment and basically use them as windows into a 3D virtual space as opposed to just kind of a continuation of a 2D space. It's been interesting for us to watch the evolution of interfaces around tablets and phones because there's been a lot of interesting work from Microsoft and Apple and the Android vendors. For us, what all that work so far is missing is the idea that it's an anachronism to look at one screen at a time and view that as your computing experience. The next version of all of our computing experience is going to be multi-screen and multi-device. We have all these powerful screens and all these pixels all around us all the time. We need to use them more effectively. So in the next year or so, I think we're going to see a huge kind of efflorescence of gestural and spatial input and more and more understanding among lots of different folks building computing experiences that multi-screen is really interesting. Oblong is dedicated to the idea that technology alone is no longer enough. Technology and design have to be conjoined, have to be inseparable, and have to be part of the same development process otherwise we're not going to get anywhere valuable at all.