Oblong's G-Speak is a project from a new line of research at the MIT Media Laboratory.
Development first began in 1994 by trying to make information more literally spatial. Examples of technology were created by building something like a flight simulator for music, in which a listener-pilot swoops and zooms and dives above a vast active living musical score. The music plays in synchrony with dynamic elements that swarm atop the score to keep track of time, to keep track of instruments. Shifting forward to the year 2000 and G-speak's creators are the science & technology advisor to the film Minority Report, which is in preproduction. G-speak's creators were placed in charge of insuring that all the future technology seen in the movie's 2054 setting is plausible. Their 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. The movie was released in 2002 and the actors involved in the project were the first to use g-speak.
Oblong has created something amazing. The UI is the first thing that you'll see, this is merely the surface of Oblong's spatial operating environment, which understands space, geometry, your hands and what they are doing, and the huge amount of real time data required to make an environment like this work effectively in the networked world.
Over the past two years, Oblong has very quietly put together an incredibly gifted team of software developers to create what they believe is the future of how humans will interact with computers. Using a pair of gloves users can manipulate pictures on screen by zooming, panning, pulling and even transferring pictures from a screen to a surface for manipulation. You can dynamically control 3D objects using a variety of gestures such as flicking, scrolling, rotating. In the video below G-speak is demonstrated fully with multi user interaction and direct image manipulation and animation. The designers claim the platform is optimised for massive data sets and time critical work.
According to Oblong the g-speak platform is in use today at Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities. A software development kit that runs on both Linux and Mac OS X is available. Applications are source-compatible across both operating systems and can run on ordinary desktop and laptop computers in addition to gesturally-equipped g-speak machines and clusters.
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