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Nov. 18, 1997
Human computing geared toward the rest of us
By Steven E. Brier
and Ed ScannellInfoWorld Electric
Imagine a computing world without keyboards, mice or even a graphical user interface such as Windows.
Mark Lucente, a researcher at the Thomas J. Watson labs has, and can show it to you. He calls it human computing and it uses mostly existing technology, not all of it from IBM, and has attracted attention from quite a few people, including that of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who stopped by for a 10-minute demonstration this afternoon.
Gates was able to manipulate items on a screen without the touching a mouse or keyboard, simply by gesturing with his hands and walking around where a camera could track him.
Lucente has combined IBM’s voice dictation product, called Via Voice Gold, with some vision and tracking software, placed it on an off-the-shelf (albeit high end) PC running Windows NT and added some glue and things to tie it together.
He uses a camera to track his movements and a large screen for the display. Unlike virtual-reality gamerooms, there is no need to wear cumbersome gloves, headsets or sensors. All he uses is a wireless microphone to talk to the computer.
"Give me IBM," Lucente says, and the IBM logo appears on the monitor. "Spin it," he says, and it slowly starts spinning. "Faster" and faster it spins.
"I’m not a fan of computers," Lucente says. "Whatever humans naturally do, that’s what computers should be doing."
"Look at us," he said, pointing to his arms, head and legs. "We haven’t had any major revisions in years. Software is revised all the time to mask computing and it doesn’t work."
"We see lots of uses for this in education, for the elderly and children for the 800 million people who don’t use computers and the many who do but don’t like it," Lucente said.
© 1997, InfoWorld
