I'm not being snarky – I honestly don't see a lot of use cases for this. As an adjunct to other things? Yeah. As a primary way that I interact with computing? No. For example, how would this make your authoring of this post better? Or my reading it? Or commenting? Or online banking or a myriad of other things?

ON the positive side, I can imagine some amazing things you could do in data analysis with this and I can see flicking a cool video onto a friend's picture with that gesture meaning 'send this to ben'.

The future of HCI doesn't have just one path and thinking it does holds us back – some things are better done with a keyboard, the Oblong UI will excel in other areas and a simpler mobile interface will be great in still other areas. People 20 years from now will fluidly move from one to another much as we turn on a radio, flick on a light and grab a remote to turn on the TV (all of which are interfacing to a technology) today.

And finally, we'll have implicit HCI too, ala wearable computing. 20 years from now I'll be 70 (ack!) and fully expect to have detailed health monitoring that I don't even notice with data flowing from a small data patch to my 'phone' and then being distributed to my home network, my doctor etc. Emergencies will be handled automatically – a heart attack changes blood chemistry, so if the monitor detects that change it can alert 911 even if I can't. Mundane tasks too – automatic uploading of data from the patch to my fitness program with recommendations on how to adjust my routine based on my results.

Short version? As computing becomes ubiquitous and situational. HCI will become fragment and adapt the uses. g speak is cool, but is just one niche of what HCI will be.

At first glance, as Steve said, it does seem like Oblong creates a poor effort/reward ratio. Why exert all that effort if I can just move my mouse a few inches? However, I think the real heart of this discussion are the use cases and practical application for Oblong today vs. tomorrow.

HCI is one of several waves of the future. It represents a confluence of digital media and our desire/need to interact with it. I think Oblong’s take on this will evolve as people continue adopting new ways to use it. We’re already seeing this with mobile devices. As people have already said, a main theme here is ubiquity. No one wants to be chained to a computer – we want high interactivity from anywhere…

This notion of “ubiquity” is everywhere. A great read is a Forrester Research article by James McQuivey called “How Video will take over the world.” I like his notion of “OmniVideo” – which I think plays nicely with the idea of people interacting with digital media beyond the computer.

http://omnivideo.wordpress.com/about/

I’m waiting for the complete eye replacement surgery from the Minority Report. – Innovation with a capital Eye.. haha…

We came at the HCI issues from a different place. We (Experticity) started pre-Minority Report as well, so when I saw a simulation of our app in the film, I felt ill. Fortunately, we actually built it and remain the leader in our space, and have rolled out production product to a growing number of enterprises. Consumers and Corporations love it, and we are producing results that are off the chart. While it is not as technically dazzling as Oblong, It is solving very real, pressing and growing issues that we all face every day, now more then ever. If you want to learn more, go to experticity.com and or contact me.

It’s also important to recognize that g-speak is a “spatial operating environment” (see http://oblong.com/article/086E19gPvDcktAf9.html)…. There are several key components to g-speak, including free-hand, three-space gestural input. Recognize that this is a superset of virtually all existing gestural input approaches, especially everything in the touch computing domain (e.g. it’s trivial to apply g-speak’s toolkit to a 2d device.) In addition, g-speak includes something the Oblong guys refer to as “recombinant networking” – this is a unique way of dealing with large real-time multi-person data sets. Recombinant networking is required to be able to do something interesting in 3-space with large amounts of data as well as multiple users simultaneously.

There are already a number of real world implementations of Oblong’s spatial operating environment – both in production and prototype stage. Look for more tangible examples coming soon to a video stream near you.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/crowe.htm…

When I couldn't find anyone working in neurophysiology or artificial intelligence who had an inkling about the bandwidth of the optic nerve, I approached the problem myself from a different angle. I calculated that to produce an encompassing stereoscopic, hemispherical image a foot away from the face, with 24-bit color, 2,400-pixel resolution, and 30 frames-per-second refresh, would take 15 terabits per second one way or 30 terabits full duplex.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/crowe.htm…

When I couldn't find anyone working in neurophysiology or artificial intelligence who had an inkling about the bandwidth of the optic nerve, I approached the problem myself from a different angle. I calculated that to produce an encompassing stereoscopic, hemispherical image a foot away from the face, with 24-bit color, 2,400-pixel resolution, and 30 frames-per-second refresh, would take 15 terabits per second one way or 30 terabits full duplex.

At first glance, as Steve said, it does seem like Oblong creates a poor effort/reward ratio. Why exert all that effort if I can just move my mouse a few inches? However, I think the real heart of this discussion are the use cases and practical application for Oblong today vs. tomorrow.

HCI is one of several waves of the future. It represents a confluence of digital media and our desire/need to interact with it. I think Oblong’s take on this will evolve as people continue adopting new ways to use it. We’re already seeing this with mobile devices. As people have already said, a main theme here is ubiquity. No one wants to be chained to a computer – we want high interactivity from anywhere…

This notion of “ubiquity” is everywhere. A great read is a Forrester Research article by James McQuivey called “How Video will take over the world.” I like his notion of “OmniVideo” – which I think plays nicely with the idea of people interacting with digital media beyond the computer.

http://omnivideo.wordpress.com/about/

I’m waiting for the complete eye replacement surgery from the Minority Report. – Innovation with a capital Eye.. haha…