Oblong Industries is the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment.

The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

Some of the SOE's core ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong's founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT. Other foundational components are less directly visible but as crucially transformative. The g-speak platform braids development arcs begun in the early 1990s at MIT's Media Laboratory, where Oblong's principals produced radical user interface advances, distributed and networked language designs, and media manipulation technologies.

From academia; into popular cinema; and out broadly into the world as commercial product: it's an unordinary path for technical thought and effort, but one -- leading to g-speak -- that seems now logical and even necessary. The people who work in Oblong's Los Angeles and Barcelona laboratory offices are as concerned with design as with programming, with humanist principles as with running a company. Synthesizing these concerns is the only way to insure that the metamorphosis of human-computer interaction we offer the world will be one of beauty and durable worth.

science fact

guest post by Brad Feld

Over the past 30 years I've had a series of powerful moments with computers that profoundly shaped my perspective on technology. The first was as a 12 year old when my Uncle Charlie took me into the data center for Frito Lay in 1977, handed me a big black APL book, and sat me down in front of a computer terminal. Another was when Raj Bhargava, Matt Cutler, Eric Richard, and Mathew Gray hovered around me in front of a Project Athena computer in the MIT Student Center in 1994 and showed me Freshman Fishwrap and Wandex running on a very early version of Mosiac. The most recent happened two years ago when I walked into Oblong's lab in downtown Los Angeles and John Underkoffler slipped some gloves onto my hands. read more...

g-speak in slices

posted by kwindla

A capsule history of modern computing might look something like so:

the batch processing age.
development of interactive systems: teletypes; time-sharing; terminals. the rise of the command line.
transition to graphical user interfaces. character-mode and bitmapped applications. the personal computer. the spread and standardization of mouse-driven, two-dimensional window systems.
networks. tcp/ip and udp in use almost everywhere.

That's a history from the perspective of adoption, read more...

origins: arriving here

posted by jh

Here you are.

You are Oblong. There are different ways to count, and depending how you do it you are two and a half years old; or you are four years old; or almost fifteen; or you're a quarter century; or you appear to have been born on 13 November 2008. You have many parts, and ideas have arrived from all over the place to build you, but there are some central strands too. Go back.

1. It's about 1994. Part of you is pursuing a new line of research at the MIT Media Laboratory, trying to make information more literally spatial. Your feeling is that, ten years in, read more...

commercial overview: platform and products

posted by christian

The Spatial Operating Environment

Oblong Industries is the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment.

The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels offers the first major step in computer interface since 1984.

Oblong helps clients deploy SOE-based solutions to real-world problems, including:

analysis of large data sets
operation of three-dimensional interfaces
construction of efficient multi-user collaborative applications
integration of large screens and multiple computers into room- and building-scale work environments
development of large-scale applications that run interactively across enterprise networks

read more...

terra firma