Even before the days of William Gibson and the concept of VR, technophiles have explored the idea of breaking down the human-machine interface. At this year's Electric Garden, Siggraph's emerging technology showcase, that fantasy is starting to look more like reality. A number of gesture-recognition technologies at the Los Angeles event put the human body at the center of the interface - with no wires attached.
"The things that are spectacular are the ones clawing down the barriers of 3-D interaction," says Rick Hopkins, chair of the Electric Garden. "It's natural computer interaction - gestures, pointing, directing, really simply things - [and] we're getting to a stage where it's really close."
The theme of this year's Electric Garden is Interfaces, and while many of the exhibits involve the typical paraphernalia we've learned to expect for futuristic interfaces that utilize the body (VR helmets, wired-up gloves, motion-sensitive wands, free-standing joysticks, etc.), the most engaging are ones that simply use the unhindered body.
An ATR Media project called Direct Manipulation Scene Creation uses a video field to recognize predefined hand gestures, allowing human to manipulate objects in a 3-D world using only their hands.
A Sony project eliminates the joystick in a one-on-one fighter game and replaces it with the players themselves. The two humans stand in front of a screen and "fight" each other without touching using a series of defined moves; a motion-capture camera translates those moves to the videogame's avatars in real time for an enthralled crowd.
"We want people to enjoy playing with their own body motion," says Dr. Sidney Fels, a researcher at ATR who helped develop the human kaleidoscope Iamascope. "People who [wouldn't] see themselves in front of a video camera will play with this for hours."
It's hard to drag people away from the Iamascope: Being in the center of it is like a no-strings-attached acid trip. The Iamascope uses a video camera as the eye of a kaleidoscope and turns the motions of a human into a symmetrical landscape on a giant screen, complete with soundtrack. Your motions change the tempo and pitch of the music; playing with a colorful ball turns the screen into a visual and aural symphony sensitively controlled by you.
And although it requires a helmet, the ultimate body-machine interface eliminates the body altogether and goes straight to the brain. The Mind Garden, from Paras West Productions at UC Santa Barbara, uses a combination of EEG technology and brainwave analysis to read the frequencies of users' brains and use that to move objects around in a 3-D landscape. A hopeful volunteer envisioned the system becoming a useful computer interface for the severely handicapped - even though humans seemed to have about as much control over their brainwave frequencies as the plants used in a demonstration did.
But despite the simplicity of a body-controlled interface, which could potentially open up the world of computers by making them easy to comprehend and control, the reality of these machines is still many years - and dollars - away. And for every cool wire-free interface here that works and is engaging, there's another that doesn't quite do the trick.
"It's a paradox - as interfaces become easy to interact with, the algorithms become infinitely more complicated," says J. Craig Applegath, an Electric Garden committee member " ... The stuff we see is child's play, but the potential is there. It's just got a raw, unfinished edge."
