'Minority Report' Inspires Technology Aimed at Military
By JONATHAN KARP
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 12, 2005; Page B1
LOS ANGELES -- In the futuristic movie "Minority Report," Tom Cruise gestures with his gloved hands to sift through crime-clue data that are displayed on giant screens. With the twist of a wrist he can move information from one column to another or delete items.
Pamela Barry, then a Raytheon Co. engineer, had a eureka moment while watching the 2002 Steven Spielberg sci-fi flick. 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.
Raytheon then hunted down the scientist who was behind the movie technology, John Underkoffler. Raytheon decided to fund an effort to try to turn his film fantasy into reality and explore its potential for speeding up intelligence analysis, says Allan Mattson, the defense company's director of national space programs...
...Raytheon believes such "gesture technology" can help solve one of the military's biggest problems: information overload. 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.
The technology also has commercial potential. Software engineers developing everything from three-dimensional modeling programs to videogames have long strived to liberate consumers from the computer keyboard and mouse.
"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 appears to be among the leaders in applying gesture technology. The "gestural interface" is part of a broad quest to find intuitive ways for people to interact with the digitized world of computers. Such efforts encompass speech recognition and touch-screen technologies...
...One recent morning, Kevin Parent, a former MIT colleague of Mr. Underkoffler's, donned black gloves to demonstrate gesture technology.
"Shall we step into the ring," he said, referring to a metal truss holding several infrared cameras and a projector. Standing before the wide screen, Mr. Parent raised one hand, his index finger pointing like a pistol. Pressing his thumb down while moving his finger across the screen is like clicking and dragging an icon with a mouse.
So far, Mr. Underkoffler has invented a vocabulary of more than 20 gestures, each corresponding to a mathematical formula. As Mr. Parent pans westward across a projection of the downtown Los Angeles skyline by moving his hand to the left, he raises it to simultaneously enlarge the buildings. "We're panning and zooming," exclaims Mr. Underkoffler. "And you still have another hand."
Mr. Parent toggled between a rooftop video of downtown Los Angeles and an overhead map to analyze the scene from different angles. With hand flicks, he zipped forward and backward through the video clip and noticed the gradual movement of a window-washing crane atop a distant skyscraper, something that was undetectable at the video's regular speed. In a battle situation, that crane could be a piece of slow-moving heavy artillery...
...Raytheon is working on more immediate applications, such as a device called a Common Tactical Blackboard to offer a portable bird's-eye view of a battle zone and software that suggests combat responses. But Mr. Underkoffler retains the right to pursue commercial uses, such as command-and-control operations for railroads and ports, and virtual wind tunnels for industrial designers. Videogames are also in the mix. With similar but less advanced technology, Sony Corp. already markets the EyeToy, in which a camera captures a person's movements and incorporates them into the game on the TV.
