Futuristic Interfaces on Display at SIGGRAPH | Hacker News Reader

Futuristic Interfaces on Display at SIGGRAPH

technologyreview.com

59 pointsjp_sc17 comments

Holy crap. If they did not have videos of all these technologies, I would not believe them. These prototypes work. They just work. It's only a matter of scaling up the detail and packaging it right for consumers. The future is here.

> The future is here.

The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. -- William Gibson

That super CAVE system is probably too expensive for consumers, though. The HMD alone probably costs a couple thousand usd.

...tactile holograms?

GIVE ME MY HOLODECK. Please, please be in my lifetime.

How old are you? I only wish I could have gone to siggraph this year

I wouldn't hold my breath. Touch screens were invented in, what, 70s? And it took somewhat 30+ years for it to be widely used by the average person.

assuming that we'll see change at the previous growth rate is silly if we get molecular engineering.

I really like the scratchable input idea, but their gestures seem overly complex for realistic use. I think that double tapping on my desk to answer or hangup on a speaker phone call would be a nice touch to any smart phone. You could probably implement it with the microphones already existing on most handsets.

Many two or three microphones can do better? Distinguishing position or something. That can be very useful.

If you knew the position of the sensors, you could probably calculate a position from audio/vibration delays. You could make a kit for converting a normal whiteboard into a recording surface.

Simply place sensors on the board corners and tell the software about their placement and the dimensions of your board. You need three sensors to do a proper triangulation, but you only need two if you know the sensors are in corners. With only two corner sensors, one of the two possible locations would be off the board, so you could throw that point out. If you can reliably sense whiteboard marker and eraser sounds, you could reliably "save" the whiteboard state.

Wouldn't the delay between 2 sensors only give 1 delay, and thus one dimension? I don't follow how placing them on the corners makes this work.

D'oh! Sorry, you are correct. I was thinking you'd get two distances to point of contact, but you actually get relative distance of the point of contact with respect to the sensors. You are correct, you would need three sensors.

I was thinking you could use volume, which would work with 2 sensors as you describe, but I like the idea of delay as it's probably more accurate.

That idea kind of exists - a block with sensors sits atop the whiteboard and the pen is in a small holder. The sensors (I think they were IR or Ultrasound rather than sound) track the pen and have a serial link to a PC.

Last I saw them in person was 8-10 years ago, though.

This... is magic. Plain and simple.

Desktop fabricators, now "touchable" holograms.

What a great time to be alive :)

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. :)

--Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law (smiley added)

Any idea how hard the ultrasound radiation pressure (used in the tactile holograms) would be to make?

I guess you just need transducers, and some software to time them correctly? That's unbelievable to me.

They say they can't get very powerful though or stray sound would damage your hearing. I wonder if there's any way around that? i.e., different frequencies?

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