Hands and pixels: from the "Minority Report" interface to a full-stack spatial computing platform
The future of computation will be characterized by real-time interaction with multiple screens and multiple devices. "Applications" will run as federated assemblies of processes executing across multiple CPUs. Graphics will render across multiple screens and displays. And architectures will enable harmonious use by more than one person at a time. Oblong Industries is a seven-year-old company founded with the goal of bringing about this future. Oblong's full-stack platform, called "g-speak", delivers multi-screen, multi-user UI components built on top of new networking paradigms and OS-level services. We'll briefly examine the technology's origins in complementary strands of research at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s and its subsequent refinement through the Minority Report "prototyping experiment," and will then discuss some of the unique aspects of the architecture and the unconventional influences on its design.