A TED Talk given by Tom Underkoffler showcases the Sixth-Sense interface. As Tom and co. designed the interfaces seen in Minority Report, much of this will seem very familiar.

Essentially, he believes that the manipulation of 3d data using 3d gestures is the future of the computer interface. Do I agree? I’m not sure.

Perhaps one of the more confusing aspects of this video is that it demonstrates some cool looking toy problems, but doesn’t really give me a sense for how this might be used in the real world. Certainly the real world, and much of our brains, operates in 3d. But the data and information that we most commonly manipulate isn’t really 3d. My papers and projects aren’t really in 3d. How would this system make the work I’ve been doing over the past few days (writing a paper) any easier? He used the interface to easily navigate through 3d data to pick out an image that looked interesting or exciting. This sounds great when you aren’t sure what you’re looking for, and what you’re looking for is visual. But a lot of what we do is text-based, and much of the time we know exactly what we’re looking for. A human searching for something visually is going to be much slower than a computer searching based on a search term. He says that the companies who need to wade through a lot of data would benefit from this as early adopters, but a lot of text or numerical data seems unwieldy.

On the other hand, I could see great uses in those fields where people actually do have 3d data. CAD drawings, physical design, architecture. Anything that we have forced into a 2d plane so that it could fit on a computer screen.

I think it’s an interesting idea, and Tom has wild aspirations for this technology. But ultimately, I think that assuming our world should be entirely 3d manipulatable is a bit of a jump. Perhaps much of what we do is 2d because we have been forced their by existing technology, but I’m not sold.