Grabbing data and pushing pixels, a visit with Oblong Industries (video)

As Kwindla Kramer, CEO of Oblong Industries explains it, for the past 30 years we’ve trained ourselves to think of computing in terms of one screen of pixels. In Oblong’s vision of the “post-PC” world, our workspace spans across phones, tablets, PCs, TVs and more all at the same time. Oblong was the company that came up with the design for Minority Report, and their Mezzanine product allows people to collaborate and move applications around a multiscreen work canvas.

As part of that work, Oblong developed g-speak, a spatial operating system that gives users the ability to use multiple inputs like iPhones and gestures to maneuver through applications. As a test, it developed Seismo, which uses USGS earthquake data and allows the user to visualize, move through and manipulate data using gestures. According to Oblong interactive designer, John Carpenter, this gesture control was an “a-ha moment” for him as he now felt he had a physical connection with the data.

We took a visit to Oblong to see firsthand the work they are doing to combine multiple screens with multiple inputs.

Kramer explains Mezzanine and Oblong’s way of thinking about a post-PC workspace.

Carpenter gives us a walkthrough of Seismo and how it works.

Kramer talks about the differences in designing for voice, touch and gesture.

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