G-Speak and the User Interface of the Future

One and a half years ago I was fortunate to be present at a meeting with Steve Ballmer where he fielded some questions from a group of recruiters within Microsoft. At the meeting Steve was asked what would he like to change about technology in the future? What would he like his technological legacy to be? Amongst many things right at the top of the list was redesigning operating systems and how people are allowed become more intuitive with their bodies and minds in operating computer systems instead of relying on the present mouse-and-hand paradigm which we have an ubiquitous preponderance of today. As he spoke I tried to form some images from his words to bring myself into his future. In the abstract I found a formidable opponent.  But now with the help of the amazing work of the extremely talented Oblong industries  I can realise the picture that he painted in its totality.


As the inventors put it themselves:

"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."

Cloud recruitment in the future may involving geo-spatial gloves that are a combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking which will bring us a major stride forward in computer interfaces since 1984. We may all be able to gesture with our hands to a mobile device and execute a number of commands simultaneously using voice recognition. Enjoy!