Your Future Workspace
Those of us with computer-related back problems, wrist and eye strain watched a certain portion of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report with envy. Now, thanks to advances in low-cost displays and technology adapted from video games, freedom from the traditional desktop may be closer than we think.
The flashy, glassed-in Precrime workstation used by Tom Cruise’s character was a slick evocation of several current interface elements: gesture recognition, eye tracking, and translucent data layers. Characters literally manipulate data, while conversing via multiple videochat sessions happening in the background, “underneath” the main layer.
The roots of such a workstation already exist. For example, The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has what it calls “data CAVEs,” a sort of proto-holodeck with projectors and motion sensors. SGI’s for-hire Reality Centers are used for the same sorts of tasks, usually advanced biochemisty or engineering simulations.
At the personal-computer level, companies have promoted various “interactive visual desktop” concepts, like Sun’s Starfire, Apple’s Knowledge Navigator, and IBM’s actually-prototyped DreamSpace concept. IBM researcher Mark Lucente used to demo it at industry shows, pointing at a screen and speaking to the computer, saying such context-sensitive commands like “Put a globe there, make it bigger, now rotate it.”
Researchers at UNC Chapel Hill took advantage of several built-in technologies in Mac OS X to build a prototype layered videoconferencing application that allows users to point to and interact with shared applications.
There are examples of nearly-disposable tech that could be cobbled together into systems today. Voice recognition dialing comes built into even the cheapest cell phones. The EyeToy is a sub-$100 add-on for the PlayStation 2. It’s “good enough” technology that’s firmly entrenched in the mainstream, and could be improved by decades-old MIT concepts, like voice recognition that uses multiple mics to determine directionality and filter out background noise.
New consumer technologies are also pushing this towards the tipping point, like new super-small DLP projectors with cool-running LED light sources. These projectors, smaller than a Mac Mini and costing about the same, could easily be integrated into a cubicle, above and behind a worker. Rapidly maturing virtual keyboard technology could mean the end of clickety-clacking crumb-catchers.
So in theory, your future office-pod wouldn’t even have a monitor, keyboard or other physical clutter at all; maybe not even a traditional desk. Instead, you’ll have a curved screen, a projector situated above and behind you, and various sensors in front of you. Need to make your data portable? Drag-and-drop your documents onto smartpads with e-paper displays…or your iPod 2010.
The next step, of course, is the operating system and new GUI paradigms to enable this. What sort of form would this virtual desktop have? Will we see layers appear like Apple’s upcoming Dashboard of useful micro-widgets? Or will we finally see something like OpenDoc, an environment without applications per se, just universal document and media editing “parts”?
Over to you. How do you see the future of workspaces? What do you want to see?
For more on the research that went into the Minority Report visual interface, visit Luke Wroblewski’s Functioning Form
February 17, 2005 10:48 AM
One great benefit that a Minority Report-like workstation would be that people could once again integrate exercise into their daily lives!
I wasn’t aware of the EyeToy. That is amazing technology for that dollar amount.
Unless I’m looking for something very portable, I think I’ll stick with my crumb-catching clickety-clacker. The virtual keyboards seem to violate Donald Norman’s Feedback Principle.
As almost everything that I desire to do is on a computer, getting comfortable in my working environment is a constant struggle for me, but short of mind-readers, it’s going to be difficult to combat repetitive stress injuries through hardware.
Speaking of mind-reading, I think there could still be some great advances made in software. Sure, someone can go through all of the trouble of programming (or soon, recording) AppleScripts, but I imagine there could be potential for your computer to learn your common tasks, and eventually do them for you.
wrote kadavy on February 26, 2005 7:38 PM