art with code

2010-04-30

That hand-wavy movie GUI



Oblong's G-speak prototype (G stands for Gesture, as far as I can tell). They consulted on the Minority Report movie, which then inspired them to build an actual prototype. (Via Cocktail Party Physics)

Who do you sell that to? Museums? Universities? Put it in lecture halls, have the professors wave through their slide decks? Automotive design houses might buy a couple to augment their VR caves. Air traffic controllers... kind of, except that it needs to be either secondary or a proven stable system.

It is the new technology dilemma: no current applications, new hardware, no exact target market. (Or very entrenched "target markets" that want proven products which have jumped through all the regulatory hoops and are backwards compatible and have an excellent sales force to wine and dine the people holding the strings of the corporate purse.)

I suppose the largest market would be semi-wealthy individuals. Strap it onto a 50" HDTV, have them wow visitors with awesome gesture-driven slideshows of holiday pics and the way you can change channels and surf the web from your couch. But without a remote or a keyboard. Worked for the iPad.

You can't replace the computer desktop with it, because the desktop has infinite inertia. And you need to rewrite all the apps to fit that thing. It does sound like they do need to use a carbon copy of the iPad strategy: have an App Store and integrate media stores and the web, require creation of a Store account to use it, have it be a not-computer (to not set high expectations and to avoid having to compete with the strong competitors), make it look cool and different (again to avoid comparisons), do the cool things well and basic things passably, sell an upgrade a year later ("It fixes all your problems!")

Extract money from people entering the platform, extract money from people on the platform, extract money from people upgrading the platform, extract money from people who want to sell things to people on the platform. Fight very very hard to maintain your grip on the money pipes.

Oh, also, I drew a new picture.

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