Jay Goldman

I have my Dad to thank for a lot of the things that have got me where I am today. He’s an avid reader who got me started at a young age (with the best version of The Hobbit I’ve ever seen but couldn’t locate online), a very successful entrepreneur in the tech industry, and a lover of high speed driving and fast cars. So I really pay attention when he sends me links to things with the subject “Check this out!”. This morning was a link to Oblong Industries, developers of the g-space Spacial Operating Environment (SOE). It is definitely worth checking out:

Impressive piece of tech — made more impressive by this guest post on their blog by Brad Feld. For those not familiar with him, Brad (currently suffering a Denial of Service attack) is a very successful VC who has put a bunch of money into them after knowing one of the founders for years and seeing a demo. Also impressive that the same founder was a tech consultant on Minority Report (YouTube video of the user interface).

Of course, this wouldn’t be a blog post if I didn’t find something to complain about, right? Two things bug me about it:

The first is that there’s a lot of research going on right now into multi-touch gestural interfaces that involve direct manipulation of objects through gestural UIs, just without gloves. Some of the better known examples are the iPhone (obviously), the Microsoft Surface, and Jeff Han’s work at Perceptive Pixel (see his TED talk from two years ago). So I wouldn’t say that this is as ground breaking as they make it out to be. It looks like they’ve got some innovative work around linking the screens together and maybe in the spinnable ‘table’, but it’s hard to understand from the video what the real value of those features is.

Which brings me to my second point and one that’s shared with the videos of Jeff Han’s work: why do they always show abstract examples of zooming maps and flying characters? It’s impressive to look at but totally meaningless without context. Maybe this is the future of Human Computer Interaction, but if that’s the case it should have glaringly obvious applications in the real world and I can only believe that there demos would be more powerful if they took a task we all do every day and showed us how it would be so much better. I suspect, in the end, that these won’t turn out to make our every day tasks any easier and that they will prove hugely useful to a ’small’ subset of users rather than the mass, wide-scale change they predict. If you want to see something that has a much stronger possibility of having a significant impact on real computer use, check out my friend Anand’s company BumpTop, who are doing pretty amazing things right on your existing desktop.

What do you think? Will multi-touch, networked, interactive screens become the norm? How far out?

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