From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jul 04 2002 - 21:39:24 MDT
The BEST digital arts conferences ever were probably
the three CyberArts Cons that began in 1990 and ended
in '92, when I believe they ran out of money.
Virtually everyone was either a researcher or an
amateur experimenter or an artist, except for the
corporate heads who came to be first in the field.
I believe it was at CyberArts 3 that we got to see a
solo orchestra using gestures. This guy started
playing a one-man band on the stage, with all kinds of
instruments. Then people, like a woman with a baby
carriage, started appearing on stage, would wander
over to his set and casually slip a drum into the
carriage - or the woman with the wide brimmed hat who
slipped a cymbal under it --- and the guy just kept
playing - never missed a beat. At the end, he was
alone on stage with no instruments at all, but then
you could see this array of tiny little sensors on
stands that were pointed at him.
Of course, The Vivid Group was also there with their
dynamite live Mandala show, a twenty minute
performance art piece using the Mandala version of
Myron Kreuger's patented VideoPlace. The last time I
saw the full show, the main performer was using the
Mandala interface to drag open circular windows onto
other live environments, such as musicians backstage,
so they appeared to be peering out of portholes on the
projection screen as the other effects were generated
around them.
At the big local youth mall in Orange - recently in
the news for gang shoot-ups, and the gangs are there
now in force, more's the pity - there is a major
gaming place that has a system developed jointly with
Sony and Holoplex out of Pasadena. It was demoed
originally at SIGGRAPH. Most of the other VideoPlace
systems use simple edge detection, combined with
velocity of edge measurements perhaps, and trigger
points in a virtual environment.
The holoplex system used actual real-time gesture
interpretation. It was linked to a standard arcade
kick-boxing game. I.e., the gestures - such as
punching, kicking, jumping, stepping - were recognized
from the input image and then mapped to preprogrammed
motions of the game character you controlled.
Unfortunately, as I have discussed here before, the
various major players are furiously working behind the
scenes in R & D labs around the world to perfect
VideoPlace systems that will beat whatever their
competition introduces. They can't bring them out yet
as that would run head on into Myron's patent, and
also they want to incorporate as many new patented
features as possible.
Vivid, for example, with apparently some funding from
Intel after years of being starving artistes, patented
a "proportional device," which both I and Myron agreed
was both so obvious (I think I even suggested it to
them at CyberArts '90 or '91) and also covered in his
original very broad patent as well as his extensive
published research that the patent could easily be
invalidated. However, I doubt that it has been, and
it probably has gone beyond the period during which it
could be challenged, so that gives Vivid a lock on one
key piece of technology that will be incorporated into
thousands of products when VideoPlace finally emerges
from the corporate legal closet.
That factor, if nothing else, may make "Minority
Report" a valuable piece of property, as it will be
difficult to patent something that millions of people
have seen. Let's hope for more future technology
projection from Speilberg. Kill those patents in the
womb! Ha! Patent infanticide?? .... ;)
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