MIT researcher John Underkoffler was a science advisor on Minority Report–then helped build a real computer with an interface like the one in the movie:
I remain skeptical about many of the details shown here, but I always love to see new experiments & to hear the reasoning behind them. [Via]
This immediately reminds me of the Kinect UI demo for the new XBox360 from earlier this week. It was just for navigating media, but the future UI possibilities are huge. And, it’s an actual product that you’ll be able to actually own this fall.
Yeah, I saw that on TED. Imagine the RSI (repetitive strain injury) of such interfaces.
[“Remember the gorilla arm!” –J.]
The last demo was stunning. How do you think the ‘character selections’ were made? It pulled pretty decent travel mattes of the characters. Was that likely done beforehand?
[I’d be intensely surprised if it weren’t. –J.]
One more UI-in-the-movies example: Iron Man 2 had some great sequences, where Stark is exploring the model table to find the new element (Triangulum!).
There are automated feature extraction algorithms based on 3D point clouds and similar, so it is possible to do automatically, but not in realtime. This was definitely precomputed.