These guys are as close as you can get to the Minority Report UI (having actually designed it). They call it a "Spatial User Interface." Here's a great quote from the founder of Oblong, stating the problem space:
Your feeling is that, ten years in, the GUI that's taken over the world's idea of interface isn't getting at everything there is. Substantial swaths of human brain are dedicated to understanding space, understanding geometry, understanding physical structure. A cartoon of a messy desk surface doesn't much tax these swaths. The swaths can work harder, ought to be made to. You propose that informaton -- and maybe especially the newly-blooming internet -- has a topology but not yet a topography. Source
The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.
And in fact, Minority Report's designers spent a lot of time with Oblong prior to filming the movie. Here's a quote from Oblong's founder:
It is a few months later that Minority Report visits your lab. The great production designer Alex McDowell and the legendary propmaster Jerry Moss have arrived to see MIT's emerging technologies. They intend to extrapolate forward from what they find, in order to depict the plausible future demanded by the film's director. They spend a lot of time with the Luminous Room systems.
It's the new millenium, and you are three thousand miles farther west. You are the science & technology advisor to the film Minority Report, which is in preproduction. You have the broad charge of insuring that all the future technology seen in the movie's 2054 is plausible. But your major responsibility is to design the interface that will be used in several key scenes. In these scenes, characters must exercise an astonishing control over vast streams of image and video data. Source
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