Boston Globe - g-speak - 26 Sep 2005
Anthony Townsend
Table, a device used to do urban design simulations at MIT
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/luminousroom/
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http://g-speak.com/press/bg-gspeak-26sep2005.html
From sci-fi effects, real potential
By Scott Kirsner
Hollywood gave tech entrepreneur John Underkoffler an unlikely hand
in getting two companies off the ground.
In 2000, Underkoffler, then a researcher at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology's Media Lab, was experimenting with ways that graphics
might be projected across the walls of a room instead of being
confined to a computer screen. He also came up with a method that
uses hand gestures instead of a mouse or keyboard to tell the
computer what to do.
When Alex McDowell, a production designer for the sci-fi film
"Minority Report," visited the Media Lab, he was dazzled by
Underkoffler's demo.
"They knew they were going to end up with some kind of weird
interface that Tom Cruise would use," Underkoffler says of the
movie's star. "And he liked the physicality of the thing."
That Schwab's Drugstore moment in Cambridge spawned two companies: G-
Speak LLC, which could change the way we control computers, and
counts defense contractor Raytheon as its first customer, and Treadle
& Loam Provisioners, a consultancy Underkoffler launched to provide
scientific and technical advice to movie and TV producers.
So far, Underkoffler has offered guidance to the TV miniseries
"Taken" and movies such as "The Hulk" and "Aeon Flux," which stars
Charlize Theron and will be released in December.
One production he's now working on is the Adam Sandler movie "Click,"
which is about a man who discovers a remote control that enables him
to fast-forward and rewind to different points in his life. It'll be
out next year.
Underkoffler had always planned a move to Los Angeles and, in 2000,
the opportunity to serve as a technical consultant to "Minority
Report" provided him with his chance. In the film, Cruise's character
uses hand gestures to guide the computers he relies upon to
investigate a murder that he is predicted to commit in the future.
But once "Minority Report" was released in 2002, the idea that it
might one day be possible to control computers like a symphony
conductor directs an orchestra, with precise hand and finger
movements, intrigued other businesses, including Raytheon. How well
did the technology work outside of a movie set? The Waltham company
wanted to know.
"They engaged us to produce a proof-of-concept that was tuned for
them," Underkoffler says. "It happened very quickly. We did all of
the development in about nine weeks, toward the end of last year."
The real-world G-Speak system, as designed for Raytheon, uses between
six and eight infrared "motion capture" cameras positioned around the
room, each of which tracks tiny white reflective beads that are
affixed to a pair of gloves. Specific gestures are linked to specific
commands, like pointing at an object on the screen and moving it around.
Inside Raytheon, there was skepticism that the sci-fi technology
would work, according to Allan Mattson, the company's director of
advanced programs. But Mattson and his colleagues thought the
potential balanced out the risks.
"A lot of our strategic programs have an information overload
problem," he says. "The problem is, if you've got more information
than you can use, you tend to let it spill on the floor and just
ignore it."
Raytheon's interest helped Underkoffler finance the start-up of G-
Speak, which is working to commercialize the gestural interface
technology. Raytheon and G-Speak collaborated on a demo of the
technology for the National Space Symposium in April. Raytheon
invented an acronym for the system -- crucial for getting bigwigs at
the Department of Defense to take it seriously. It became known as
IGET: Interactive Gestural Exploitation and Tools.
Mattson says that Raytheon is still talking with its government
customers about building gestural technology into systems that
perform tasks like sorting through surveillance data from satellites
or unmanned aerial vehicles. He also thinks it may have applications
in air traffic control or real-time crime investigation -- which
harks back to "Minority Report."
Underkoffler imagines applications outside of the defense industry.
"No one has come to our lab and not said, This would be perfect for
my domain,"' he says. Some day, surgeons might rotate an MRI image of
a patient's brain with a twist of the wrist. Video game players may
vanquish foes with a virtual sock to the chin.
"We're at a moment of transition," Underkoffler says. "We've been
stuck with the mouse and keyboard for 25 or 30 years. Soon, we'll
have a multiplicity of interface techniques available," from gestures
to speech to eye movements and perhaps others, "and you'll use the
right tool for the task in question."
Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Fast Company. He can be
reached at kir...@pobox.com.
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