Take on look at the world of mobile devices — from multitouch smartphones and tablets to virtual assistants ready listen to your questions and give you answers — and you get the idea that the world of interfaces is changing fast. Desktop interfaces, however, are a different story. “Despite advances in 3D sensing and display technologies, our desktop interfaces have not changed much from 2D interactions,” MIT PhD candidate Jinha Lee says.
Lee, along with a Microsoft research lab, has created a transparent 3D desktop display that puts your hands behind the screen and your desktop’s files literally at your fingertips. Users can search and rearrange the files simply by moving their hands.
If this futuristic interface sounds like something out of the Minority Report, that’s because it is. Unlike much of the technology in tablets and iPhones, this new 3D desktop display is not so much touch-based as it is interaction based. It’s one part Samsung OLED technology and one part Microsoft Kinect. To keep the 3D system illusion intact, the desktop display uses cameras to keep track of where your head is.
The system is still a work in progress. As Lee explains on his website, it actually began as a research project while he was interning for the Applied Sciences Group at Microsoft.
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