Minority Report seems to be a reference point for new UI technology, as well it should be. Touch-free gesture-based navigation, and passive ID may very well be the future of human machine authentication.
I watched “Real Steel” tonight. Not great, not awful. One thing that irked me though was the display they kept showing. It was a clear glass display, visible on both sides, with no background at all.
Who wants to see/needs to see/ or wants to display the back of their monitor? Why would you want a display that had a constantly changing background?
I get that it makes it look futuristic, but it’s not practical at all. I’ll try to suspend my disbelief and ignore such things in the future. The real future.
In the lobby of the physical science building, they’ve got a screen set up that’s on a transparent window and operated via gesture-tech, just to show off. The transparent screen works just fine, but the gesture tech is reminiscent of an old ball mouse that’s accumulated an eighth of an inch of grunk on the rollers, except not as smooth.
My nomination is going to be Star Wars-style holograms. Not for lack of market, but because holograms don’t work that way. In order to see a real hologram, your line of sight has to intersect with the physical object that’s producing the hologram (a pane of glass or whatever). And there’s no way known or speculated to make one that’s just floating out in the air.
How about a really bright laser that illuminates the dust in the air, similar to how you can see a green laser beam at night but this one is bright enough to see in the day? Maybe the hologram projector will also puff out some fine dust to make the hologram easier to view and when it’s finished it vacuums the dust up again. Maybe the laser could vapourise the dust so you don’t need to vacuum it up.
Ok, I’ve just thought about it some more and the laser will form a beam so we will see a bunch of beams and not the points making up the hologram. Maybe we can have two projectors and only where the beams intersect is there enough energy to make the dust particle glow?
How about floating nano-particles that emit light when they are in the correct position and then fly back to the emitter at the end of the broadcast to be recharged and ready for re-use?
Isaac Asimov wrote the novelization of the movie Fantastic Voyage and, as an aside, explained why the miniaturization that was the entire foundation of the story would never be possible. He then hand waved it away and got on with the story.
There’s equipment to project “holograms” into dust in the air. They’ve been used in concerts for Gorillaz and will be used to have the late Nate Dogg appear at Coachella this year.
They cannot, however, produce a 3D image, just a 2D projection. For a concert, that’s fine since the audience is all on one side and far enough away that depth perception won’t come into play.
I guess it depends on how well the Kinect holds up over the next few years. Is it just a novelty, or does it have real advantages over existing interactivity.
Yep. And all that waving your hands in the air is going to make your arms tired very quickly. Compare this to the delicate wrist or finger movements you need with a mouse, trackball, stylus, or other handheld pointing device.
How about those non-openable (except by the intented recipient) message capsules mention in “Foundation”? Or the oracle-like “simulacrums” of Hari Seldon?
The real thing I regret-1950’s SciFi was full of descriptions of synthetic foods-and you could carry around a weeks worth of food in your pocket. Thank God that didn’t happen.
I kind of know what you mean. I turn off Aero transparency on my Windows desktop because it interferes with reading text, but I think very bright single colour text, which you can focus on in a different plane to the background, and which is mobile, it will shift around subtly to add to the separation, and would work well.
Plus, imagine having weather information on a window pane, or GPS information discreetly in the corner of the windscreen, or an mp3 player on your bathroom mirror. It would be really cool.
Heck, having information appear on an otherwise transparent surface is the entire basis of a “heads-up” display, which the military has been using to varying degrees of sophistication for decades.
Yes, but there’s a very good reason for that. What’s behind the display is equally important if not more so than what is being displayed. The pilots need to fly. When was the last time you felt a real need to be able to see through your computer monitor?