I’m about to go onstage and give a talk about the themes of the upcoming book at Time Warner, and one thing I’m going to show is this video from Oblong Industries, an OpenCoSF participant company founded by the folks behind all the amazing UI stuff in Minority Report:
I’m also showing that stuff like this is getting very real – Leap Motion is taking orders for an entirely new way to interact with computers:
What with the proven success of Microsoft’s Kinect, and some of the stuff I’ve seen in labs at MIT, Microsoft Research, Google, and other places, it strikes me that in the not too distant future, it’ll be pretty natural to come into a room that is “data lit” – a room that is “lit up” with sensors and connected to the cloud, such that you can exchange information inside that room using your body, your voice, and your hands. It’ll be as natural as expecting a room to be “wifi lit” now. Or, 25 years ago, as natural as expecting that a room be lit with computer projection, or 50 years ago, with a phone – and of course, 100 years ago, with light itself.
Just stoning out while I wait to go on stage…
I fully agree with you. You’d be interested in what we are doing at SmartThings to integrate the data from a wide array of sensors into an open cloud and app platform. The results and implications are significant in contexts ranging from energy management to security to health to convenience to random human fun. Interesting times ahead.