By SCOTT DEWING
Published: June 2006

IN THE FUTURE, we may all be resembling Michael Jackson. Not in a freaky botched-plastic-surgery-nose kind of way or a “Hi, want-to-come-have-a-sleepover-at-my-ranch?” sort of way. Nothing creepy like that. But we’ll probably all be wearing The Glove. Yes, in the future—shall we go with 2020?—we’ll probably all be sporting a single glove at work and perhaps at home too. Like MJ, some of us may choose to wear a white, sequined glove just to show everyone how BAD we are. Others of us may be more in touch with the Dark Side and choose a black glove and insist that our friends call us “Darth”. While yet others of us will go for the designer gloves. As for me, I’m envisioning a SpongeBob SquarePants glove that will match my designer swim trunks.

Anyway, whatever type of glove we choose, it’ll be for interacting with our computers like Tom Cruise in the 2002 sci-fi drama Minority Report. In that movie, Cruise plays the role of John Anderton, the chief of the “Department of Pre-Crime” (or DOPC). The year is 2054, and through the freakish precognition abilities of three half-naked women who float on their backs in a giant bathtub, all homicides in the Washington, D.C. have been for the past six years. The half-naked babes in the bathtub are called “precogs” and together they can see a violent crime before it’s committed. Once the would-be murderer has been identified, a posse from the DOPC goes and snatches him up to be inducted into the “Hall of Containment”.

You’ve probably already seen the movie, so I’ll spare you the plot and get to the cool stuff: Tom Cruise wearing a black “data glove” that he uses to access, zoom in, manipulate and literally push around data on the DOPC supercomputer.

Steven Spielberg didn’t come up with the idea of gesture recognition as a means of a user interface with a computer system. In 1999, he met with fifteen “future” experts selected by Global Business Network’s chairman Peter Schwartz to brainstorm what the world would be like in 2054. Among other ideas, this panel of futurist discussed the “data glove” that Cruise used in combination with specific body gestures to move data around on several wall-sized computer screens.

Technically speaking a data glove is a haptic device. Haptics refers to the science of applying tactile sensation to human interaction with computers. A haptic device is one that involves physical contact between the computer and the user, usually through an input/output device, such as a data glove, that senses the body’s movements. By using haptic devices, a user is able input information into the computer system as well as receive information from the computer in the form of a felt sensation on some part of the body. (And yes, the online porn industry is very keen on the development and improvement of this technology.)

Gesture recognition is a bit different from a haptic interface. According to the definition at webopedia.com, gesture recognition is an interface with computers using gestures of the human body, typically hand movements. In gesture recognition technology, a camera reads the movements of the human body and communicates the data to a computer that uses the gestures as input to control devices or applications. In addition to hand and body movement, gesture recognition technology also can be used to read facial and speech expressions and eye movements.

Last year, defense contractor Raytheon began working on a computer interface similar to the one simulated in Minority Report. In bringing this movie special effect to the real world of military intelligence interpretation, Raytheon reportedly has employed John Underkoffler, an MIT Media Lab veteran and technical advisor for Minority Report. The system under development at Raytheon utilizes a pair of reflective gloves that allows users to manipulate images projected on a panoramic screen. A mounted camera keeps track of hand movements and a computer interprets gestures. According to media reports, Raytheon plans to offer the technology as a way to sort through large amounts of satellite imagery and intelligence data.

With the incredible volumes of data being generated and stored every moment of every day, there’s plenty of opportunity for non-military applications. We are quickly approaching a point where our traditional “human interface devices”, such as the aging keyboard/mouse combo, will become inefficient for interacting with computer systems—especially large distributed systems like the Internet. Together, gesture recognition and data gloves could prove to be useful tools for human beings to interact with computer systems, moving around and diving through mountains of data that will become so complex and deep that we’ll eventually need to come up with a whole new symbolic representation system. We’ll need to develop a deep understanding of these symbols, which we’ll move about, toss aside and combine to form new unique combinations of data that may eventually need their own symbols. Some might call the symbols “hieroglyphs” or “pictograms” others might refer to them as “mathematics”. They will be simple representations of complex ideas—a metadata floating atop a deep ocean of sub-data.

Meanwhile, I hope we won’t have to wait 20 years for a replacement to the clunky keyboard/mouse input system and the dullness of “windows” on our “desktops” and the tediousness of clicking through pages and pages of Google search results. Until then, glove or no glove, I’m sure there’s at least one simple gesture—a single finger—that some users will continue to wag at their computers when they’re frustrated.