The Irony of Minority Report

The movie Minority Report has become an iconic example of NUI for the masses. The irony is: While Minority Report has brought a lot healthy mass media attention to NUI, its generally seen by practitioners as being a horrible example of a NUI itself.

Jonathan Brill has published a really fun and interesting deconstruction of Tom Cruise's human-computer interface. My favorite part of the blog is is when Jonathan is talking about how Tom Cruise is standing there waving his arms around.

"While typing and mousing might cause mild fatigue, making your upper arms defy gravity for hours or even minutes on end is straight up painful. In fact, this position is so painful that CIA used this "Stress Position" to break Guantanamo Detainees."

In the end, Minority Report will be seen as having a positive impact on NUI because it has elevated awareness of the paradigm, so we should not be too critical. It's just something we have to deal with, or as Nathan Moody puts it:

"All of our project pretty much start off the same way, in which we say, 'Yes. We've seen Minority Report.' - after we get through that unpleasantry we go through the regular design process .... "