Minority report - Here We Come

No, not the suspended animation stuff, the super cool gloves and the 3D holographic, interactive, all-enveloping display. This from the BBC Digital pen plus Pick and Beam

Dr Rekimoto's lab has extended the drag and drop technique used in most PC software to create a 'pick and drop' technique. So the owner of a handheld computer can pick up a file from their device, using a special pen, and drop it onto the screen of another computer, by placing the pen on its screen. These technologies are very interesting for truly intuitive interaction Ian McClelland, Philips He refers to this approach as 'direct manipulation'. It allows people to visually select and move information in physical space, rather than having to understand abstract concepts of networks and servers. The pick and drop technique would make it easy for two colleagues in a meeting to exchange files between their laptop computers, new acquaintances to pass each other electronic business cards, or friends to swap references to websites or music tracks they like.

Another technique that the labs has developed is referred to as 'pick and beam'. This uses displays projected onto tables and walls, using data projectors, that act as extended working spaces. Documents can be dragged using a special pen from a computer desktop into these spaces. There they can be spread out or exchanged, allowing people to work with them almost as if they were paper documents. Remember the mouse "These technologies are very interesting for truly intuitive interaction," said Ian McClelland, a senior design consultant at Philips Digital Systems Laboratory in the Netherlands.

Now I don't usually get goggle eyed about tech stuff, although i admit to being seriously impressed by the audacity and execution of the first 777 I flew on. But infotech stuff, ho hum, what is it good for?

However, when we start contemplating being able to pick up information and fling it on a wall and interact with it there, then pick it up and drop it into someone else's lap(top), I start to get a tingle.

Mostly because many years ago, in about 1977, I started writing a story about a guy who was an investor, a global money manipulator whose task, it turned out, was to crash the economy of a major power whose government had been hijacked by a bunch of religious maniacs, so, you know, total fantasy stuff.

Anyway, said guy, who never reached the point of actually having a name, ran his business from a circular platform around the edge of which was projected a holographic display that enabled him to keep track of the global economy and his investments in it. The platform responded to his physical and verbal cues with no keyboard and above all no damned floppy discs. This, mind you, when i was struggling with an Amstrad PCW8562.

Looks like I might yet live to see some of the fantasy come to be. Now, all I need is the facelift and a few more laps in the pool to pass for this guy.

Comments

[JOn Husband]

Hi, Earl. How interesting that you posted on thuis. I HAVE been reading your stuff for a while, and remarking to my colleagues that you have a very clear vision for the tool, the Personal Content Manager or Personal Knowedge Manager that you would find most useful.

And ... I've been meaning to ask you if you would consider being a beta tester for a drag n' drop visual workspace, that is a rapid-assembly microcontent publisher. We're just finishing some hacks to it - now can post linked sequential tours of drag n' dropped content to email or blogs or ERP systems or CRM systems. or push the content out "horizontally" through a Viewer, into which we intend to develop enhanced presence features. So, we believe it will help blogs become more-dimensioned digital storytelling tools.

This app also can handle web services and agents, and so will with further development become an effective platform for customized online services, business or otherwise.

Please let me know if you are interested in the possibility of beta testing. Some other very knowledgeable KM and personal productivity blogers have agreed to be beta testers, and so we hope that with their help we will be able to deliver, pretty soon, a tool that enhances the capabilities of blogging and publishing, interacting and providing services online.