Art imitating life imitating art imitating life
Click here to watch a video that forecasts where we’re going with videoscreen technology. You’ll be glad you’ve watched this. Then come back here. We’ll wait.
What was the inciting incident for this new tech? This is an example of life imitating art imitating life imitating art.
The film “The Minority Report” was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick (one of my favorite writers, whom we’ve been discussing here and here ). As you’ll recall, there are many shots of Tom Cruise and others manipulating holographic images by hand. The filmmakers researched cutting-edge technology, got wind of research into this particular idea, and decided to incorporate it into the film. Here’s what happened next: Some entrepreneurs saw the movie, decided that that looked like really great tech that they could get into early, and found venture capital money to start the further research and development. Then it was reported in Inc. magazine, where I saw it.
To people like me — interested in science, but working in arts and entertainment — the story of art influencing science and vice versa is thrilling. All of us who are writers tell ourselves that we are changing the world, or at least trying to.
And while I’m on the topic, the most obvious recent example of that phenomenon, of course, is a little movie called “An Inconvenient Truth,” which has utterly changed the political climate in the U.S. (And, perhaps ultimately, the world climate.)
March 2nd, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Very cool. No idea what I would use such computing power for, since I mostly use my computer for word processing and e-mail. The screen used in the video probably costs over $2k, and the computer it’s hooked up to is probably not your usual low cost HP or Dell. Still, it’s interesting/fun to see what’s coming down the pike, and, like Lee, I’m an arts guy with an interest in science.
Since, as far as I can tell, most new visual technologies are exploited quickly by pornographers, I wonder what they’ll use this for.
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:09 pm
This was fun to watch. I got the same feeling as when I visited my brother in the Silicon Valley a number of years ago, and watched him work on some of the first 3D computer graphics. He ended up inventing and designing, along with his team of engineers, the first XBox for Microsoft!
During my visit, he was working on putting different textures on a basketball. I had never seen anything like this before on a computer screen.
Computer graphics have come a long way since then! And so has the XBox. It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Wow!
Much more efficient than a mouse and that’s the main limitation in modern computing and file manipulation – if you think about it, that’s 20 year old technology.
As always, the usage of innovation like this tend to be very specialized at first – healthcare immediately springs to mind – in areas that can afford it, and will gradually filter down for general use. Limitations of hand or gesture based interfaces generally come from the necessity to type to interact. Minority report used voice commands along with the manual gymnastics, so I’m hoping that *good* voice recognition together with this kind of technology will clear my desk….
maybe in 2010