My Evolving Mind Towards Spatial Computing

The other night I was sitting with my roomates talking some about computing and why I have taken the approach of connecting my N8 to one of the monitors. Its not so much that I think that a mobile’s screen isn’t good enough, but that I think we can do a lot more with both the screens and data that we go through.

This point became a bit more real to one of my roomates when we talked about his options for computing when his laptop and mobile were stolen. I offered him the suggestion that he should look at a smartphone that could connect to a monitor (even if it doesn’t do it in an HDMI fashion like my N8), and then leverage the ability for the mobile to essentially be the central point to the screens that he wants. He passed on the thought – he wanted to be able to play Facebook games.

Nevertheless, our conversation continued and I got to talking about where my mind for this kind of thinking comes from. I started with this TED Talk about spatial computing that was done a little more than a year ago.

I then opened up another video. Since he was familiar with the XBox Kinnect, I thought that showing something a touch further with the N8 would be good – hence this video of Nokia Plug and Touch.

I then pulled up another video to show him what could happen when you start to take content that’s pulled from several sources and then present it in a space-respecting manner (no matter the screen that it’s presented on. I found this video of MS Photosynth and Virtual Earth to make that point:

By this point, I got pretty excited – its hard not to be when you see stuff like this that’s essentially here but not quite in wide use. Spatial computing is (as stated in the TED video) the kind of user interface revolution that we are long overdue in seeing. The Wii and Kinnect are probably the bridge point for consumer understanding of it, but its not quite far enough to me. That’s where the mental synthesizing of these videos comes into play for me and where my conversation with ym roommate takes one of those turns away from him and towards how my mind works.

I imagine moments where my mobile is connecting to a series of screens wirelessly but also playing ther ole of a magic wand to those screens. Or, in transportation sisutaitons where I can use wearable computing such as these glasses that came out just a few days ago to better acknowledge status information and controls.

I just kind of want to see computing that enables life by actually using the space around us, not merly limiting us to the screens with bezels: