Making Things See

Project 7: Minority Report Photos

This next project is going to build on what we just learned with the Invisible Pencil in order to implement an interface similar to the one that helped define the idea of gesture-controlled technology in popular culture. In the 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report (based on a Philip K. Dick short story), Tom Cruise played a “pre-crime” policeman who uses the predictions of psychics to anticipate and prevent violent crimes. Cruise accesses these predictions as a series of images on a projected screen that he navigates with gestures. He drags his hands to pull in new images, spreads them apart to zoom in on a telling detail, pinches to zoom out to the big picture.

Note

The gestural and touch interfaces demonstrated in ...