Oblong Industries is the developer of the g-speak spatial operating
environment.
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.
Some of the SOE's core ideas are already familiar from the film
Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis
using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no
coincidence: one of Oblong's founders served as science advisor to
Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly
on his earlier work at MIT. Other foundational components are less
directly visible but as crucially transformative. The g-speak platform
braids development arcs begun in the early 1990s at MIT's Media
Laboratory, where Oblong's principals produced radical user interface
advances, distributed and networked language designs, and media
manipulation technologies.
From academia; into popular cinema; and out broadly into the world
as commercial product: it's an unordinary path for technical thought
and effort, but one -- leading to g-speak -- that seems now logical
and even necessary. The people who work in Oblong's Los Angeles and
Barcelona laboratory offices are as concerned with design as with
programming, with humanist principles as with running a
company. Synthesizing these concerns is the only way to insure that
the metamorphosis of human-computer interaction we offer the world
will be one of beauty and durable worth.
Back in February, John Underkoffler guided TED
conference attendees through a brief tour of several g-speak
applications. The TED staff did a great job filming and editing the
talk, which you can now watch on TED.com and on YouTube.
All of us at Oblong enjoyed this opportunity to show our code off
to a theater full of technology enthusiasts. John demonstrates
g-speak applications that our clients use every day. But several
of those capabilities -- the scalable image navigation
environment, the SQL data-diving interface, the gestural wand --
haven't previously been part of our public presentations.
As usual, technology development outpaces marketing and the
future is here, just lumpy in distribution.
John also talks about why we think it's time to transition to a
new way of thinking about and using computers. And he tells the
story of g-speak, describing some of his precursor work at the
MIT Media Lab and for Minority Report.
At the very end of the video you can see a bunch of us running
around in the background taking everything offstage. We had set
up a portable version of our typical four-screen, multi-user
g-speak system, as well as a separate workstation and various
cables patching us into the TED video and network
infrastructure. We got everything out of the way and into the
wings in just over three minutes. Parallelism of a different sort
than we are usually concerned with! read more...
Reporter Cris Valerio and producer Elizabeth Gould spent several days with us in LA in October. You've likely seen Cris hosting Venture, as well as her coverage of the technology beat. Elizabeth was responsible for the ground-breaking "Green Business" series.
Cris and Elizabeth shot footage for a mini-series called Innovators. The series has aired, and can be watched on the web, too, along with a bunch of great supplementary, online-only content.
Oblong is the topic of the first episode, "Turning Point." read more...
Over the course of the twenty minute talk (viewable via the video above) Carlton furnishes the first public overview of the technical capabilities of plasma, Oblong's rewindably networked framework for data self-description, encapsulation, and interprocess transport.
Carlton also provides a glimpse of a 'common operating environment' built atop plasma and g-speak. This new environment enables collaborative work at multiple levels: (1) application sharing and control; (2) input-output coordination; and (3) data synchronization. The video that he shows -- a video-within-video, as you view it overhead -- involves an air-traffic analysis scenario.
For the record, Carlton's work in gestural interface is the earliest (at Oblong): as far back as the first few years of the 1990s, he was building systems like ICONIC at MIT. Here's some documentation of that work; more is available by searching the world wide web. read more...
Amber Frid-Jimenez
and Kelly Dobson are teaching a g-speak lab
at Rhode Island School of Design
again this semester. We're excited to see what another class of
designers and artists do with g-speak. We count ourselves really lucky
to have the opportunity work with so many great people at RISD, MIT and
USC.
So far this year there are experiments in story telling, gestural
etiquette, dance, spatial form making, and digital pottery. The images
below link through to videos on youtube.
Jamie Zigelbaum and other researchers at MIT's Media Laboratory, working together with Professor Hiroshi Ishii in the Tangible Media Group, are pursuing a line of research they characterize as 'body, object, space, screen, and surface':
... today pixels are cheap and computers are fast -- after 40 years we are almost ready to move past the mouse. With new gestural interfaces like g-speak [3] we can create digital environments that are nearly seamless with architectural space. We can create hybrid spaces where groups of people can interact with digital objects, physical objects, and each other using a shared physical language that is both legible and scalable.
A cadre of Oblong personnel is even now on (strictly speaking, in a special gallery under) the ground in Park City, Utah, where we've deployed TAMPER at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The TAMPER installation is a giddy example of the sort of image and media manipulation tools we've built g-speak to enable.
Our Sundance guests -- who already number in the thousands -- find the experience exhilarating. A few grim cinephiles have supplementally raised an eyebrow (one per cinephile) at the filmic heresy that TAMPER provides: a fluid new ability to isolate, manipulate, and juxtapose (rudely, say the grim) disparate elements (ripped from some of the greatest works of cinema, continue the grim). For us, what's important is the style of work: real-time manipulation of media elements at a finer granularity than has previously been customary or, for the most part, possible; and a distinctly visceral, dynamic, and geometric mode of interaction that's hugely intuitive because the incorporeal suddenly now reacts just like bits of the corporeal world always have. Also, it's glasses-foggingly fun.
Subsequent posts will likely detail the installation's software architecture, but for the present consult TAMPER's youtube channel for video documentation of our Sundance engagement.
Over the past 30 years I've had a series of powerful moments with computers that profoundly shaped my perspective on technology. The first was as a 12 year old when my Uncle Charlie took me into the data center for Frito Lay in 1977, handed me a big black APL book, and sat me down in front of a computer terminal. Another was when Raj Bhargava, Matt Cutler, Eric Richard, and Mathew Gray hovered around me in front of a Project Athena computer in the MIT Student Center in 1994 and showed me Freshman Fishwrap and Wandex running on a very early version of Mosiac. The most recent happened two years ago when I walked into Oblong's lab in downtown Los Angeles and John Underkoffler slipped some gloves onto my hands. read more...
A capsule history of modern computing might look something like so:
the batch processing age.
development of interactive systems: teletypes; time-sharing;
terminals. the rise of the command line.
transition to graphical user interfaces. character-mode and
bitmapped applications. the personal computer. the spread and
standardization of mouse-driven, two-dimensional window systems.
networks. tcp/ip and udp in use almost everywhere.
That's a history from the perspective of adoption, read more...
You are Oblong. There are different ways to count, and depending how you do it you are two and a half years old; or you are four years old; or almost fifteen; or you're a quarter century; or you appear to have been born on 13 November 2008. You have many parts, and ideas have arrived from all over the place to build you, but there are some central strands too. Go back.
1. It's about 1994. Part of you is pursuing a new line of research at the MIT Media Laboratory, trying to make information more literally spatial. Your feeling is that, ten years in, read more...
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