John Underkoffler is the CEO of Oblong Industries, and he is perhaps best known as the science advisor for the landmark sci-fi film Minority Report. Long before the body suit of Ready Player One, Underkoffler helped envision Minority Report’s scene where actor Tom Cruise uses “data gloves” and gesture controls to manipulate a transparent computer. He talked about the creation of that experience and what comes next at our recent GamesBeat Summit event. To bring that vision to reality, he founded Oblong Industries in 2006, and launched Mezzanine for enterprise collaborators in 2012. Oblong’s technological and design trajectories build on 15 years of foundational work at the MIT Media Lab, where Underkoffler was responsible for innovations in real-time computer graphics systems, optical and electronic holography, large-scale visualization techniques, and the I/O Bulb and Luminous Room systems. Above: John Underkoffler hopes gaming will lead … [Read more...] about ‘Minority Report’ adviser John Underkoffler ponders the user interfaces of the future
A graphical user interface
Python Scripts as a Replacement for Bash Utility Scripts
For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced veterans, in the Linux community, command-line use is encouraged. Often the command line can provide a more elegant and efficient solution when compared to doing a similar task with a graphical user interface. As the Linux community has grown up with a dependence on the command line, UNIX shells, such as bash and zsh, have grown into extremely formidable tools that complement the UNIX shell experience. With bash and other similar shells, a number of powerful features are available, such as piping, filename wild-carding and the ability to read commands from a file called a script. Let's look at a real-world example to demonstrate the power of the command line. Every time users log in to a service, their user names are logged to a text file. For this example, let's find out how many … [Read more...] about Python Scripts as a Replacement for Bash Utility Scripts
‘Minority Report’ adviser John Underkoffler to ponder user interfaces at GamesBeat Summit 2018
We are delighted to report that our latest speaker for GamesBeat 2018 is John Underkoffler the CEO of Oblong Industries and science advisor for the landmark sci-fi film Minority Report. He did such a great job in both a presentation and a visionary panel on augmented reality that we invited him back for another visit to the future. Long before the body suit of Ready Player One, Underkoffler helped envision Minority Report’s scene where actor Tom Cruise uses “data gloves” and gesture controls to manipulate a transparent computer. To bring that vision to reality, he founded Oblong Industries in 2006, and launched Mezzanine for enterprise collaborators in 2012. Oblong’s technological and design trajectories build on 15 years of foundational work at the MIT Media Lab, where Underkoffler was responsible for innovations in real-time computer graphics systems, optical and electronic holography, large-scale visualization techniques, and … [Read more...] about ‘Minority Report’ adviser John Underkoffler to ponder user interfaces at GamesBeat Summit 2018
A history of the Amiga, part 12: Red vs. Blue
The year 2000, which once seemed so impossibly futuristic, had finally arrived. Bill McEwen, president of the new Amiga Inc., celebrated with a press release telling the world why he had bought the subsidiary from Gateway Computers. “Gateway purchased Amiga because of Patents; we purchased Amiga because of the People.” It was a bold statement, the first of many that would come from the fledgling company. Amiga Inc. now owned the name, trademark, logos, all existing inventory (there were still a few Escom-era A1200s and A4000s left), the Amiga OS, and a permanent license to all Amiga-related patents. They had also inherited Jim Collas’ dream of a revolutionary new Amiga device, but none of the talent and resources that Gateway had been able to bring to bear. To chase this dream, Amiga Inc. would have to look elsewhere. McEwen thought he had found the answer in an obscure British technology startup. This was the Tao Group, started by Francis Charig, a UK businessman, … [Read more...] about A history of the Amiga, part 12: Red vs. Blue
Psensor – A Graphical Hardware Temperature Monitoring Tool for Linux
Psensor is a GTK+ (Widget Toolkit for creating Graphical User Interface) based application software. It is one the simplest application to monitor hardware temperature and plot Real Time graph from the obtained data for quick review. Psensor – Linux Hardware Temperature Monitoring Features of Psensor Show Temperature of motherboard, CPU, GPU (Nvidia), Hard Disk Drives. Show CPU fan speed. Psensor is capable of showing remote server Temperature and Fan Speed. Show CPU usages, as well. Infact Psensor will detect any supported Hardware and report the Temperature as text and over graph, automatically. All the temperatures are plotted in one graph. Alarms and Alerts ensures you don’t miss a critical System Hardware Temperature and Fan Speed related issues. Easy to Configure. Easy to use. Dependencies lm-sensor and hddtemp: : Psensor depends upon these two packages to get the reports about temperature and fan speed. psensor-server : It is an optional package, which is required … [Read more...] about Psensor – A Graphical Hardware Temperature Monitoring Tool for Linux