John Underkoffler: Sci-Fi Interface Design in the Real World

MIND & MACHINE: Science & Tech of Maximizing Human Capability

My guest today is John Underkoffler. As an early member of the MIT Media Lab, John was approached by Steven Spielberg and legendary world-builder Alex McDowell to help design the interface of the future for the film Minority Report. The system John and the team designed became legendary for its vision and conceptual innovation. He’s gone on to help design many sci-fi computer interfaces including Iron Man’s JARVIS. Building on these fictional computer interfaces, John has founded the company Oblong where he is bringing these collaborative, gestural, and tactile computer interfaces to life — enabling digital objects and data to live in the environment instead of the device. We discuss John’s visionary science fiction design, his real-world incarnation of these interfaces, and go deep into many aspects of human-computer interaction. More at: https://www.MindAndMachine.io