g-speak Spatial UI ~ John Underkoffler @ TED

Lovely to see MIT Media Lab alum John Underkoffler from Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media Group demonstrate his Oblong Industries' g-speak spatial operating environment at TED Feb 2010! Thanks to Cliff Kuang for pointing to this in his Fast Company piece The Genius Behind Minority Report's Interfaces Resurfaces, With Mind-blowing New Tech, where he notes...

"Oblong hasn't previously revealed most of the features you see in the later half of the video, including the ability zoom in and fly through a virtual, 3-D image environment (6:30); the ability to navigate a SQL database in 3-D (8:40); the gestural wand that lets you manipulate and disassemble 3-D models (10:00); and the stunning movie-editing system, called Tamper (11:00). Underkoffler thinks these gestural systems -- which offer far more robustness than Microsoft's Project Natal or PlayStation's Move -- are five years from being commonplace. And he thinks they're not only cool, but necessary: "Much of what we want computers to help us with is spatial," he says. And much of what computers do is easiest to understand and navigate if we tap a visual system we've spent millions of years evolving."

Epic!