Advances in technology often come in incremental steps, and 3D screens have been a long time coming. Jinha Lee's SpaceTop 3D desktop brings them one massive stride closer to reality. He showed it off at a recent TED talk.
Gesture-control functionality has been built into Microsoft's Kinect and Samsung's Smart TV, while 3D interfaces are in the works at the University of Iowa for its Kickstarter-funded game, Oculus Rift, Wired reports. Jinha Lee, a grad student at MIT, TED Fellow and former intern at Microsoft Applied Science, worked with Cati Boulanger, a researcher at Microsoft Applied Sciences, to elegantly combine these technologies into a three-dimensional screen. The desktop works off a transparent Samsung OLED display and allows users to interact with files, folders, documents and videos with their hands.
The desktop is built with two cameras — one that tracks users' hands and another that tracks their eyes, allowing the display to correct and adjust perspective as a user moves and looks around. The transparent display would superimpose objects into what appears to be empty space, and users would reach behind the screen in order to manipulate objects.
"This project advances research in current display technologies hoping to provide a more natural interaction with everyday desktop computing of the future," Boulanger says. This falls right in line with Lee's concept of "programming the world," closing the gap between the real world and the digital. He first demonstrated this with the ZeroN, a levitating metal ball that could be positioned and manipulated both by hand and by computer. The Beyond pen, too, is a retractable pen that would allow a user to draw in 3D directly onto a display by pushing the pen "into" the screen.
This technology would probably be most useful for architects or geneticists, using the SpaceTop to create 3D models — or just any tech-head who wants to play around with the newest technology. Regular users are accustomed to expending far less energy, sliding a mouse around rather than having to actually pick up their arms. Regardless, the point is that Lee wants to make interacting physically with the digital world possible for everyone who wants to give it a try.
"It shouldn't be in the hands of scientists," he said, "it should be in the hands of normal people."
