I’ve always thought the v-type computers they use on crime shows like the CSI ones seem really cool for fiction special effects, especially the the ones that are vertical and is operated by movements of the hand.
What’s the scoop? It seems like if they can do it with hollywood effects they could also do it for real but probably very expensive to be practical.
All those fancy graphics take a huge amount of processing power and don’t serve any purpose outside of being eye candy. There’s been a couple of cases where some fictional OS appeared to be more difficult to use than a real OS would be.
I haven’t seen any of the CSI shows in a long time, but if the OSs are like a lot I’ve seen in similar programs, the amount of processing power, RAM, and drive space you’d need would be so hugely expensive that you’d be better off renting time on the machine for research programs than you would trying to use it as a replacement for your desktop PC.
Actually, I’ll disagree with Tuckerfan.
3D games, for instance, feature way more special effects and polygons than you’d ever use in even the spiffiest desktop system* and most computers can play 3D games of that level. Similarly, novel motion control is something that you’ll see going all the way back to the Famicon system and the Wii is just the newest generation. There’s no practical holdback to incorporating some sort of handwaving controller technology into our daily use.
The holdback to motion controllers are simply that unless you’re doing 3D modeling or some other thing that would be helped by cyber-interactiveness, a 2D cursor like a mouse controls is perfectly fine and you don’t have to hold your hands in the air. There are in fact 3D mice, but even those don’t get held up in the air because it’s probably uncomfortable to spend eight hours a day holding your hands in the air.
And for the desktop, simply, the sorts of people that work on creating OSes seem to suck at making something that looks slick and is functional while not bloating the system. Apple does okay, but even for them, what would be the practical advantage of a 3D desktop?
This is a giant leap - kind of like saying we should be able to grow dinosaurs or have flying cars just because of Jurassic Park or Fifth Element.
That being said, I think in this case the limiting factor is practicality. Sure it looks cool, but can you say why such an interface is more useful than the current standard. What additional benefits does it have to outweigh the additional complexity?
Hollywood portrayals of user interface design are horrible in general, even for the most trivial of applications. It almost always seems like an afterthought, designed by the cheapest bidder.
The particular uses in CSI are egregiously over the top and don’t serve to help anything. OTOH, there is a field trying to expand the use of hand gestures in controlling computer hardware, typically by the use of one or more cameras.
On a simple scale, both Firefox (through an add-on) and Opera browsers support mouse gestures, where rather than select a specific option, you motion generally with your mouse and particular actions occur.
On a larger scale, there’s everything from people trying to control DVD players (pdf) to entire companies built on the idea. If you ask me, there’s a lot to figure out here. You might think your mouse is a simple idea, but it’s the product of decades of research in to control methods, windowed software techniques, and much more. The same needs to happen for gestures, but I don’t know how far along things are.
A bit of trivia that might interest you is that the gestures in the system in the film Minority Report weren’t random; they were specifically taught by a researcher in the field as things they anticipated being fundamental actions in a gesture-based UI, so if you want to know what cutting edge was anticipating when the film was made, that was it.
Try running one of those games and doing something else at the same time. Many of the cutting edge games peg a PCs computing power. Sure, you might be able to get away with something simple like a web browser, but throw in a slightly more intensive operation (large text document, spreadsheet, etc.) and the PC’ll puke. Next, IME, unless you’re doing something which is going to be processor intensive like video editing or CAD work, you to tend to be assigned a PC that’s barely able to do much in terms of processor speed and RAM. Why should a company shell out $5K for a PC with fancy graphics in the OS, when they can spend $500 for a model that allows someone to do only what they need to do, and not have any fancy graphics?
Right. Most people don’t spend 5 minutes a day at their PC, but 8 hours, and you’re generally doing the same thing over and over again, namely typing.
Well, “bloat” is a relative term. I know some folks who think that if you can’t do 90% of your work from a command prompt, you shouldn’t be allowed near the keyboard.
Yeah but Vista put more strain on people’s computers than World of Warcraft. Regardless of the machine’s abilities, you can always make a program that will run it into the ground. More specifically, most companies will release programs that are just on the edge of being unusable based on current technology because that’s the cheapest and easiest route. But that’s going to hold true if “current technology” features a whizbang desktop environment.
More importantly, getting back to my first point, I could build a desktop environment that did everything Vista does in 3D and have it use less memory and system resources. XP and Vista are so massively overbuilt that getting in some game engine coders to redo it would probably end up as a smaller more lightweight system, and still look better.
Forget eight hours, you wouldn’t last fifteen minutes. There’s even a name for it, the gorilla arm (no relation) effect.
As a former owner of a Powerglove and a U-Force, I can tell you that novel motion control wasn’t quite ready for market yet back then.
I don’t know – my relatively ancient (November 2006) computer runs dual clients for hours and hours at a time. They get a little slow, but I blame Cider’s DirectX emulation for that. The load isn’t so much on the processor as on the graphics processor. My machine is a two-core machine (like I said, ancient), so that helps offset the load.