From Kepler to Cars: Oblong in the Press
Posted on 29 May 2012
Over the past few weeks, we’ve made our way into a number of publications. Perhaps it’s the fact that Minority Report is about to hit its 10 year anniversary, and the man behind the movie’s scientific vision happens to be our Chief Scientist. Or perhaps it has something to do with more people learning about and tapping into Oblong’s useful, interesting and fun technology (if we do say so ourselves). Whatever the reason, we’ve been delighted to see Oblong popping up in various places and thought we’d share some quick highlights.
Explore the Galaxy Using the Actual Minority Report Interface by Mark Wilson (Fast Co.Design, May 2012)
Interview with Jer Thorp on the work he did with the Oblong team in producing an interface to explore a visualization from NASA’s Kepler mission in 3-D.
We can’t stop looking at the beautiful visualizations Jer created of over 2300 exoplanets, also known to as potentially habitable “second Earths”. Here’s one of our favorite quotes from the piece: “We need to not just scale, but to distill space as we know it into something that we can conceptualize and explore.” We couldn’t agree more.
The Minority Report Report by Jake Zucker (Fast Company, June 2012)
Interactive infographic plotting technologies inspired by the film against axes of how people look using technology (goofy to normal) vs how useful the technology seems to be today (useless to useful).
We’re happy to see that gesture-based technologies are no longer pushed to the “makes you look goofy” quadrants…probably a change from three years ago.
Wave of the Future by Alex Doak (Audi Magazine, Summer 2012)
Discussion with Oblong Chief Scientist, John Underkoffler, on creating a “coherent” future for Minority Report and evolving the interface technology into part of what Oblong does today.
We often get asked what we mean by Oblong treating pixels as addressable and useable, and John quickly dives into that idea in this article: “The [Oblong] software acknowledges that the pixels are literally in the room with you…each pixel really has an X, Y, Z co-ordinate in the room, the same co-ordinate system that you share as a human. Your pixels become useable in that space.”
The piece also includes an interesting update on what Audi’s up to with head-up displays and gesture recognition.
This is turning into a banner day for user interfaces by Bruce Sterling (Wired, Beyond the Beyond, May 2012)
A quick nod to John’s TED talk from 2010.
While we’re always happy to see that folks are still discovering our TED talk, we appreciated Bruce’s summary of John’s presentation: “This Underkoffler speech is super, just chock-full of awesome lines. It’s like a entire TV episode composed entirely of ear-snagging elevator-pitches.”
5 Under-hyped Companies I Would Invest in At Any Price – 2012 Edition by Rob Go (Business Insider, May 2012)
A list of relatively small companies with big potential.
The title pretty much says it all on this one. We felt honored to be included.