Pointing to the future of UI | John Underkoffler

436,235 views ・ 2010-06-01

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:15
We're 25, 26 years after
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the advent of the Macintosh,
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which was an astoundingly seminal event
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in the history
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of human-machine interface
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and in computation in general.
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It fundamentally changed the way
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that people thought about computation,
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thought about computers,
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how they used them and who and how many people were able to use them.
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It was such a radical change, in fact,
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that the early Macintosh development team
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in '82, '83, '84
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had to write an entirely new operating system from the ground up.
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Now, this is an interesting little message,
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and it's a lesson that has since, I think,
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been forgotten or lost or something,
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and that is, namely, that the OS is the interface.
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The interface is the OS.
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It's like the land and the king (i.e. Arthur) they're inseparable, they are one.
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And to write a new operating system was not a capricious matter.
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It wasn't just a matter of tuning up some graphics routines.
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There were no graphics routines. There were no mouse drivers.
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So it was a necessity.
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But in the quarter-century since then,
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we've seen all of the fundamental
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supporting technologies go berserk.
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So memory capacity and disk capacity
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have been multiplied by something between 10,000 and a million.
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Same thing for processor speeds.
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Networks, we didn't have networks at all
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at the time of the Macintosh's introduction,
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and that has become the single most salient aspect
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of how we live with computers.
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And, of course, graphics: Today
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84 dollars and 97 cents at Best Buy
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buys you more graphics power
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than you could have gotten for a million bucks from SGI only a decade ago.
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So we've got that incredible ramp-up.
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Then, on the side, we've got the Web
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and, increasingly, the cloud,
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which is fantastic,
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but also -- in the regard in which an interface is fundamental --
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kind of a distraction.
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So we've forgotten to invent new interfaces.
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Certainly we've seen in recent years a lot of change in that regard,
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and people are starting to wake up about that.
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So what happens next? Where do we go from there?
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The problem, as we see it,
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has to do with a single, simple word: "space,"
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or a single, simple phrase:
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"real world geometry."
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Computers and the programming languages
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that we talk to them in, that we teach them in,
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are hideously insensate when it comes to space.
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They don't understand real world space.
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It's a funny thing because the rest of us occupy it quite frequently and quite well.
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They also don't understand time, but that's a matter for a separate talk.
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So what happens if you start to
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explain space to them?
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One thing you might get is something like the Luminous Room.
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The Luminous Room is a system
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in which it's considered that
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input and output spaces are co-located.
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That's a strangely simple,
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and yet unexplored idea, right?
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When you use a mouse, your hand is down here on the mouse pad.
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It's not even on the same plane as what you're talking about:
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The pixels are up on the display.
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So here was a room in which all the walls, floors, ceilings,
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pets, potted plants, whatever was in there,
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were capable, not only of display but of sensing as well.
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And that means input and output are in the same space
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enabling stuff like this.
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That's a digital storage in a physical container.
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The contract is the same
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as with real word objects in real world containers.
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Has to come back out, whatever you put in.
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This little design experiment
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that was a small office here knew a few other tricks as well.
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If you presented it with a chess board,
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it tried to figure out what you might mean by that.
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And if there was nothing for them to do,
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the chess pieces eventually got bored
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and hopped away.
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The academics who were overseeing this work
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thought that that was too frivolous,
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so we built deadly serious applications
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like this optics prototyping workbench
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in which a toothpaste cap on a cardboard box
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becomes a laser.
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The beam splitters and lenses are represented by physical objects,
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and the system projects down the laser beam path.
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So you've got an interface that has no interface.
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You operate the world as you operate the real world,
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which is to say, with your hands.
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Similarly, a digital wind tunnel with digital wind
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flowing from right to left --
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not that remarkable in a sense; we didn't invent the mathematics.
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But if you displayed that on a CRT or flat panel display,
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it would be meaningless to hold up an arbitrary object,
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a real world object in that.
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Here, the real world merges with the simulation.
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And finally, to pull out all the stops,
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this is a system called Urp, for urban planners,
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in which we give architects and urban planners back
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the models that we confiscated
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when we insisted that they use CAD systems.
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And we make the machine meet them half way.
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It projects down digital shadows, as you see here.
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And if you introduce tools like this inverse clock,
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then you can control the sun's position in the sky.
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That's 8 a.m. shadows.
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They get a little shorter at 9 a.m.
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There you are, swinging the sun around.
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Short shadows at noon and so forth.
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And we built up a series of tools like this.
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There are inter-shadowing studies
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that children can operate,
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even though they don't know anything about urban planning:
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To move a building, you simply reach out your hand and you move the building.
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A material wand makes the building
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into a sort of Frank Gehry thing that reflects light in all directions.
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Are you blinding passers by and motorists on the freeways?
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A zoning tool connects distant structures, a building and a roadway.
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Are you going to get sued by the zoning commission? And so forth.
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Now, if these ideas seem familiar
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or perhaps even a little dated,
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that's great; they should seem familiar.
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This work is 15 years old.
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This stuff was undertaken at MIT and the Media Lab
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under the incredible direction of Professor Hiroshi Ishii,
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director of the Tangible Media Group.
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But it was that work that was seen
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by Alex McDowell,
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one of the world's legendary production designers.
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But Alex was preparing a little, sort of obscure, indie, arthouse film
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called "Minority Report" for Steven Spielberg,
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and invited us to come out from MIT
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and design the interfaces
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that would appear in that film.
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And the great thing about it was
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that Alex was so dedicated to the idea of verisimilitude,
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the idea that the putative 2054
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that we were painting in the film be believable,
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that he allowed us to take on that design work
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as if it were an R&D effort.
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And the result is sort of
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gratifyingly perpetual.
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People still reference those sequences in "Minority Report"
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when they talk about new UI design.
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So this led full circle, in a strange way,
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to build these ideas into what we believe
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is the necessary future of human machine interface:
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the Spatial Operating Environment, we call it.
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So here we have a bunch of stuff, some images.
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And, using a hand,
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we can actually exercise six degrees of freedom,
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six degrees of navigational control.
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And it's fun to fly through Mr. Beckett's eye.
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And you can come back out
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through the scary orangutan.
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And that's all well and good.
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Let's do something a little more difficult.
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Here, we have a whole bunch of disparate images.
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We can fly around them.
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So navigation is a fundamental issue.
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You have to be able to navigate in 3D.
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Much of what we want computers to help us with in the first place
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is inherently spatial.
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And the part that isn't spatial can often be spatialized
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to allow our wetware to make greater sense of it.
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Now we can distribute this stuff in many different ways.
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So we can throw it out like that. Let's reset it.
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We can organize it this way.
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And, of course, it's not just about navigation,
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but about manipulation as well.
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So if we don't like stuff,
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or we're intensely curious about
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Ernst Haeckel's scientific falsifications,
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we can pull them out like that.
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And then if it's time for analysis, we can pull back a little bit
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and ask for a different distribution.
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Let's just come down a bit
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and fly around.
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So that's a different way to look at stuff.
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If you're of a more analytical nature
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then you might want, actually, to look at this
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as a color histogram.
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So now we've got the stuff color-sorted,
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angle maps onto color.
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And now, if we want to select stuff,
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3D, space,
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the idea that we're tracking hands in real space
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becomes really important because we can reach in,
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not in 2D, not in fake 2D, but in actual 3D.
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Here are some selection planes.
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And we'll perform this Boolean operation
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because we really love yellow and tapirs on green grass.
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So, from there to the world of real work.
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Here's a logistics system,
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a small piece of one that we're currently building.
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There're a lot of elements.
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And one thing that's very important is to combine traditional tabular data
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with three-dimensional and geospatial information.
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So here's a familiar place.
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And we'll bring this back here for a second.
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Maybe select a little bit of that.
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And bring out this graph.
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And we should, now,
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be able to fly in here
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and have a closer look.
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These are logistics elements
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that are scattered across the United States.
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One thing that three-dimensional interactions
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and the general idea of imbuing
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computation with space affords you
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is a final destruction of that unfortunate
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one-to-one pairing between human beings and computers.
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That's the old way, that's the old mantra:
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one machine, one human, one mouse, one screen.
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Well, that doesn't really cut it anymore.
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In the real world, we have people who collaborate;
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we have people who have to work together,
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and we have many different displays.
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And we might want to look at these various images.
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We might want to ask for some help.
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The author of this new pointing device
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is sitting over there,
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so I can pull this from there to there.
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These are unrelated machines, right?
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So the computation is space soluble and network soluble.
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So I'm going to leave that over there
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because I have a question for Paul.
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Paul is the designer of this wand, and maybe its easiest
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for him to come over here and tell me in person what's going on.
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So let me get some of these out of the way.
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Let's pull this apart:
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I'll go ahead and explode it.
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Kevin, can you help?
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Let me see if I can help us find the circuit board.
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Mind you, it's a sort of gratuitous field-stripping exercise,
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but we do it in the lab all the time.
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All right.
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So collaborative work, whether it's immediately co-located
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or distant and distinct, is always important.
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And again, that stuff
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needs to be undertaken in the context of space.
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And finally, I'd like to leave you with a glimpse
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that takes us back to the world of imagery.
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This is a system called TAMPER,
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which is a slightly whimsical look
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at what the future of editing
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and media manipulation systems might be.
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We at Oblong believe that media should be
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accessible in much more fine-grained form.
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So we have a large number of movies
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stuck inside here.
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And let's just pick out a few elements.
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We can zip through them
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as a possibility.
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We can grab elements off the front,
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where upon they reanimate, come to life,
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and drag them down onto the table here.
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We'll go over to Jacques Tati here
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and grab our blue friend
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and put him down on the table as well.
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We may need more than one.
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And we probably need,
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well, we probably need a cowboy
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to be quite honest.
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(Laughter)
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Yeah, let's
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take that one.
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(Laughter)
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You see, cowboys and French farce people
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don't go well together, and the system knows that.
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Let me leave with one final thought,
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and that is that
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one of the greatest English language writers
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of the last three decades
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suggested that great art is always a gift.
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And he wasn't talking about whether the novel costs 24.95 [dollars],
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or whether you have to spring 70 million bucks
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to buy the stolen Vermeer;
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he was talking about the circumstances of its creation
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and of its existence.
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And I think that it's time that we asked
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for the same from technology.
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Technology is capable of
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expressing and being imbued with
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a certain generosity,
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and we need to demand that, in fact.
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For some of this kind of technology,
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ground center is
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a combination of design, which is crucially important.
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We can't have advances in technology any longer
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unless design is integrated from the very start.
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And, as well, as of efficacy, agency.
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We're, as human beings, the creatures that create,
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and we should make sure that our machines aid us in that task
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and are built in that same image.
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So I will leave you with that. Thank you.
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13:18
(Applause)
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Chris Anderson: So to ask the obvious question --
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actually this is from Bill Gates --
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when? (John Underkoffler: When?)
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CA: When real? When for us, not just in a lab and on a stage?
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Can it be for every man, or is this just for corporations and movie producers?
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JU: No, it has to be for every human being.
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That's our goal entirely.
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We won't have succeeded
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unless we take that next big step.
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I mean it's been 25 years.
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Can there really be only one interface? There can't.
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CA: But does that mean that, at your desk or in your home,
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you need projectors, cameras?
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You know, how can it work?
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JU: No, this stuff will be built into the bezel of every display.
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It'll be built into architecture.
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The gloves go away in a matter of months or years.
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So this is the inevitability about it.
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CA: So, in your mind, five years time,
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someone can buy this as part of
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a standard computer interface?
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JU: I think in five years time when you buy a computer,
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you'll get this.
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CA: Well that's cool.
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(Applause)
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The world has a habit of surprising us as to how these things are actually used.
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What do you think, what in your mind is the first killer app for this?
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JU: That's a good question, and we ask ourselves that every day.
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At the moment, our early-adopter customers --
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and these systems are deployed out in the real world --
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do all the big data intensive, data heavy problems with it.
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So, whether it's logistics and supply chain management
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or natural gas and resource extraction,
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financial services, pharmaceuticals, bioinformatics,
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those are the topics right now, but that's not a killer app.
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And I understand what you're asking.
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CA: C'mon, c'mon. Martial arts, games. C'mon.
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(Laughter)
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John, thank you for making science-fiction real.
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JU: It's been a great pleasure.
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Thank you to you all.
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15:14
(Applause)
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About this website

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