“MINORITY REPORT,” FOR REAL

Sometimes, mil­i­tary researchers like to pre­tend that they aren’t grab­bing ideas from sci­ence fic­tion. Then there are times like these:
A com­puter inter­face inspired by the futur­is­tic sys­tem por­trayed in the movie Minority Report… could soon help real mil­i­tary per­son­nel deal with infor­ma­tion over­load.
The film sees char­ac­ters call up and manip­u­late video footage and other data in mid-​​air after don­ning a spe­cial pair of gloves. Now defence com­pany Raytheon, based in Massachusetts, is work­ing on a real ver­sion and has even employed John Underkoffler, the researcher who pro­posed the inter­face to the mak­ers of the film.
“Pamela Barry, then a Raytheon Co. engi­neer, had a eureka moment while watch­ing the… sci-​​fi flick,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Ms. Barry believed such a sys­tem could be a boon to the mil­i­tary as it tries to parse reams of infor­ma­tion in the heat of a battle.”

Commanders are increas­ingly unable to process the mas­sive flow of intel­li­gence from satel­lites, sen­sors and sol­diers. To tackle that chal­lenge, Mr. Underkoffler and Raytheon are devis­ing ways to visu­ally dis­play and man­age the data in a user-​​friendly way to quicken com­bat responses…
“Keystrokes and mouse clicks limit your degree of free­dom,” says Mr. Underkoffler , who earned his doc­tor­ate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By com­mu­ni­cat­ing with a com­puter through ges­tures, hands can do as much as five or six mice, he adds. “Your hand becomes a Swiss Army knife,” he says.
Raytheon, which has licensed Mr. Underkoffler’s tech­nol­ogy and unveiled it to Air Force and intel­li­gence offi­cials last week, aims to adapt it for use in future com­mand cen­ters. The idea is to stream­line the dis­jointed and lim­ited func­tions cur­rently per­formed by scores of sol­diers man­ning banks of indi­vid­ual PCs. In Raytheon’s vision, real-​​time video and maps will be fused with data­base infor­ma­tion on large inter­ac­tive screens to assess bat­tle situations.

Raytheon has no plans to use psychically-​​sensitive crack babies to parse the infor­ma­tion. Or, at least, not yet.

April 15th, 2005 | Bizarro | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.