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| Microsoft Shows Off Another 'Minority Report' UI Concept |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2009-11-07 00:24:45 |
| Whether you like Microsoft or not, the Redmond giant does have one thing going for it: the company's research division. Working together with several universities and other institutions, Microsoft Research works on the soft and hardware of the future, ranging from research operating systems to insanely cool things like what Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie showed off during the Microsoft College Tour '09 (more videos). |
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| Don't see this as the future |
| By ShadesFox on 2009-11-07 01:04:42 |
| The Minority Report interface was pretty. However, it seems to be more of an audience interface, something to let the person watching the show know what the actor is doing on the computer. Unfortunately the video refuses to work for me so I can't comment on it specifically. However, I've never seen a use case for a wall display/figure gesture interface that wasn't horribly contrived and less useful then what is available now. |
 - Score: 2 |
| Comment by righard |
| By righard on 2009-11-07 01:09:12 |
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I don't see any use for those kind of things. For example typing is much faster and doesn't strain you as much then writing by hand. Also for some reason Microsoft seems to have an unhealthy obsession for rotating and zooming things. Most tasks I know don't evolve rotating and zooming things, maybe in the future everybody is rotating and zooming away like crazy on floating sheets of glass but for now we need the precision and speed of a keyboard and mouse is stead of making gestures to our screen. I'll admit my muscles hurt a little from the Mexican flu but if I try to copy the gestures he made to zoom the windmill, my arms start to tire pretty quick, don't want to do that all day. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE: Don't see this as the future |
| By AlexandreAM on 2009-11-07 01:26:40 |
|
I used to think the very same thing (and, to some extent, I still do). But these days I can at least think of a reasonable motive behind all that thing: I believe they aren't thinking about the usage of computers we have today: Not the personal computer where you sit (or lay down) and access things. I think it's more like renewing the concept of a plugged house. One central computer with various kinds of interfaces around, mostly less powerful to the way we use them today, but possibly more expressive for small tasks and things you'd do in a "Surface" iface and this Minority Report-like thing. Having a few of those things (in a not-so-near future) around in the house, and having access with simple gestures and touches to things like notes, videos, music, video-conference and stuff like that. That's, obviously, just my view of the thing, but I could at least see it being somewhat useful to that experience. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Microsoft research |
| By leos on 2009-11-07 01:28:38 |
| The great thing about microsoft research is that they are well removed from the rest of the company. Researchers seem to have more or less free reign to do their thing, so a lot of what comes out of there is wildly impractical, pure research, blue sky stuff that certainly won't end up making microsoft any money anytime soon. That's great to see from a company research division. |
| - Score: 2 |
| g-speak |
| By cb_osn on 2009-11-07 01:35:47 |
|
You should also visit http://www.oblong.com to read about g-speak and the people who were the actual technology advisors for Minority Report and who have been working on this technology for well over a decade. This is the kind of stuff we should be working towards and reading Kroc's "What Would Make Your Perfect OS?" thread left me rather depressed by the fact that most people seem completely satisfied with the current WIMP paradigm and large, monolithic applications. A bit of an aside... The fact is that UNIX got it very right with the idea of having numerous small, simple programs that can be chained together to operate on data and produce results. It's just that so far, that concept is stuck in the CLI and no one has been able to translate it to the graphical world. My instinct tells me that our UIs and our methods of physical interaction with our computers have been the limiting factors in this area. g-speak attempts to address these problems by following the UNIX philosophy, using small tools and even including complete network transparency for all the X-lovers out there. I'm not sure if the Microsoft solution approaches it in the same way, but it's nice to see them exposing people to the possibility that there may be better ways to interact with a computer. Unfortunately, we'll never see this actively pursued by Microsoft because it is financially detrimental for them to do so. Anything that breaks WIMP will effectively end their domination of the desktop market, and in fact, may destroy the "desktop" market altogether. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: Don't see this as the future |
| By tomcat on 2009-11-07 02:34:51 |
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You're right. As Quato said (in Total Recall), "Free your mind, Quaid." If you're going to dream about the future, don't start with what you have today -- think about what you would like. Current interfaces (eg. the desktop) use physical/spacial metaphors to represent data. A friend of mine refers to the desktop as his "alternate junk drawer". But there's no reason you can't think in other terms -- temporal, for example ... using a timeline. While we have a tough time visualizing how useful that would be, it was completely useful in "Minority Report" because they were essentially sifting through temporal data. Yale computer scientist has been working on this concept for years. He calls it "Lifestreams". Check it out. Worth reading, if you're interested in this sort of thing... http://www.wired.com/wired/archi... |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: Microsoft research |
| By tomcat on 2009-11-07 02:59:33 |
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> They may be well removed from the rest of the company, but they can only bring forward, pardon my expression, crap. To many security holes. They need to get rid of registry, they need to make it an OS without holes (security vulnerabilities). They also need to make it more modular so that if a virus gets into a third party software it will stay in that software. When you have people actually endorsing wiping the hard drive and reinstalling every 3 months to maintain functionality, there is something wrong. You don't seem to be very familiar with what MS Research does. They actually do a ton of research across a wide spectrum of technologies (voice/handwriting/gesture recognition, database technology and data mining, data federation, cloud computing, alternate operating system designs, security improvements, etc, etc). Some of it is total blue-sky stuff that never seems to make it past academic papers, but a lot of it does get into product development. The problem of malware has less to do with what Microsoft COULD DO and more to do with fundamental application compatibility constraints that limit what it CAN DO without breaking every application on the planet. Researchers know how to eliminate malware: Remove interop points or sandbox applications in a VM. Virtualize every resource. Don't allow malware to affect the system. But that's easier said than done. There are a lot of legacy applications which many thousands of people depend upon which leverage interoperability points in the system. If MS changes the behavior, it not only causes the application to break, but it creates an outcry from customers and potentially introduces legal troubles, as third party software developers scream about big, bad Microsoft trying to kill them; even if it's inadvertent or well-intentioned, it's a problem. For example, installing global mouse or keyboard hooks, injecting DLLs into other processes, etc. Most malware gets installed through social engineering. Click on this cute game sent to you in email. Aw, what damage could that possibly do? Click Yes. UAC. Click Yes. Boom! How do you prevent users from shooting themselves in the foot when you allow those same users to install applications? It's a thorny problem. And no platform completely eliminates this problem unless you prevent users from elevating privileges and installing software. Microsoft Research has funded research into alternative operating system technology -- such as Singularity -- that is built almost entirely in managed code and which has an excellent security model. Microsoft has shared a lot of information about Singularity (http://research.microsoft.com/en...), and you might find it interesting. Edited 2009-11-07 03:00 UTC |
| - Score: 4 |
| not impressed |
| By superstoned on 2009-11-07 07:51:31 |
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RANT (didn't have enough sleep): I'm sorry but I'm not impressed. This company has not just millions but billions of 'excess money' - they have one of the highest profit margins to be found in any market, yet manage to get away with a stunningly low amount of innovation (compared to their competition) and a huge bureaucracy. Which makes sense considering their market position (Bell System, anyone?). Now they move some of that money towards a few universities doing flashy, academic stuff - and spend even more $$$ advertising the fact they 'do research' (I'm betting the marketing part of the research budget is twice the size of the actual research). And you, Thom, go 'oh I love Microsoft'. There must be a cool English saying for this but I can't be bothered to look it up. If half the marketing budget of MS in the last 10 years was spend on actual research, we'd laugh about 'minority report' interfaces by now. |
| - Score: 1 |
| Comment by apog |
| By apog on 2009-11-07 09:57:10 |
| To watch "the UI of the future", one must be running Microsoft OS and have Silverlight installed. Isn't that ridiculous? That's not an innovation, that's pure marketing. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[2]: Don't see this as the future |
| By Lennie on 2009-11-07 13:07:49 |
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I don't feel like ranting about Microsoft, but I do think I know what you do make an interresting point. I always imagined people would have one device. They would carry it around like a mobile/pda and when they are home, it would act like a remote for their TV and a control-system for their home automation-system and tv, etc. recording system (possible also from outside the house). But maybe not, maybe it will be more like the lightswitch in each room. Which you flick on when you go in the room and flick off when you leave again. Obviously for other functions, sound/music, curtains, lighting. Interface wise the movie and video both look terrible usability wise. I think it would only work for narrow applications. But maybe that's just me. |
| - Score: 2 |
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