Digital Digits

If you've seen the movie Minority Report, you'll remember that the only thing remotely interesting about it was the computer interface Tom Cruise's character used near the beginning of the movie. Raytheon is actually developing it--for real.

As usual, we have an ivory-tower type providing us with some incredibly obtuse commentary:

But the technology might also have non-military applications, says Stephen Brewster, who is also developing gesture-based computer interfaces at the University of Glasgow, UK.

Oh, really? Gee, I never would have considered that it may have other uses--like in, oh, say... design engineering, perhaps? If military intel types think they have a lot of data to sort, they should give coordinated engineering design a try some time.

This interface would do wonders for three-dimensional data manipulation, allowing complex structures to be manipulated intuitively, instead of with the clumsy "2.5-dimesional" interfaces and good, old-fashioned mental visualization we're currently stuck using.