Draft:John Underkoffler
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John Underkoffler | |
|---|---|
 Underkoffler at Incheon International Airport | |
| Born | John Stephen Underkoffler June 30, 1967 |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SB, SM, PhD) |
| Known for | Development of gestural UI Invention of Spatial Operating Environment Co-founder of Oblong Industries, Inc. Minority Report |
| Spouse | Jennifer Fong |
| Children | 1 |
| Awards | 2015 National Design Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | The I/O Bulb and the Luminous Room |
| Doctoral advisor | Hiroshi Ishii, Nicholas Negroponte |
John Underkoffler (born 30 June 1967) is a computer scientist, designer of real and fictional human-machine interfaces (HMIs), and advocate of new humanist and aesthetic forms of computation. He received a SB degree in electrical engineering and a master's and PhD in media arts and sciences, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served as science and technology advisor for Minority Report and designed that film's influential spatio-gestural interface. He was co-founder of and led Oblong Industries, Inc., and is the instigator of the Animist OS project.
Early and academic life
[edit]John Stephen Underkoffler was born in Philadelphia and raised in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He attended middle and high school at the William Penn Charter School.
MIT Media Lab
[edit]In spring 1985, through MIT's UROP program, Underkoffler joined the Media Lab as a researcher working in the Spatial Imaging Group under Professor Stephen Benton. There he contributed to techniques in synthetic optical holography.[1] and in electronic holographic display[2]. For the latter, Underkoffler developed algorithms for computing optical interference patterns using the massively parallel Connection Machine, allowing standard computer graphics scenes and models to be 'rendered' for realistic, imaging-quality dimensional playback[3] on the group's pioneering HoloVideo system. His frequent collaborators in the Spatial Imaging Group included Mark Holzbach, Michael Halle, Wendy Plesniak, and Michael Klug.
During a hiatus from MIT (1991 to 1992), he worked with Terry Maxedon and Amy Fisch to build the Imatec camera, a massive, stepper-motor driven lenticular imaging system[4]. The dynamic optical geometry and control software he designed for the camera allowed it to produce large-format three-dimensional images at the theoretical limit of refractive optical quality.
In the mid-1990s his formal research focus moved from holography to radical user interface, with Hiroshi Ishii and Nicholas Negroponte as dual doctoral advisors. Working in Ishii's Tangible Media Group, Underkoffler pursued new interaction modalities designed to make full use of human manual dexterity. He invented the I/O Bulb, an evolution of the ordinary light bulb encapsulating a digiatal projector-camera pair, to move interaction off the bounded screen and into the physical world. Driven by spatially aware software, an I/O Bulb projects information onto real-world surfaces and so attaches digital meaning to physical objects; human manipulation of the objects is detected by the camera to close the interaction loop[5]. He built working systems applying the new interaction mode to fields including fluid dynamics, optical system design, and urban planning[6]. His dissertation further describes the Luminous Room, an extended interaction environment resulting from treating every surface in an interior architectural space with one or another of many coordinated I/O Bulbs[7].
Improv and scripted comedy
[edit]In autumn 1988 Underkoffler joined the cast of the Boston chapter of ComedySportz, a semiprofessional improv comedy troupe. He, Marty Barrett, and Todd Bearson later began writing together; they eventually scripted and performed a show titled "Hoist Point Orchestra".
Cinematic and entrepreneurial work
[edit]Hollywood science advisor
[edit]Beginning with Minority Report, Underkoffler served as science & technology advisor to a string of high-profile Hollywood productions[8]
Following a chance meeting at the Media Lab, Minority Report's production designer Alex McDowell recruited him into a role responsible for integrating, harmonizing, and (as necessary) inventing the future tech to be depicted in the film. He designed the movie's gestural user interface, and choreographed gestural sequences for and trained Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, and Neil McDonough.
Subsequent engagements included comprehensive science design work for The Hulk, working with director Ang Lee and production designer Rick Heinrichs; for Karyn Kusama's Æon Flux; and for the first Iron Man film. He provided more limited consultation to the miniseries Taken and the films Big Fish, The Island, Stranger Than Fiction, I Am Legend, and Iron Man 3.
Oblong Industries, Inc.
[edit]In response to industry interest in a real-world instantiation of 'the Minority Report interface', Underkoffler began developing a successor to the techniques and code used in his 1999 dissertation work; by the end of 2004 the resulting 'spatial operating environment', named g-speak, enabled multi-user gestural control of complex spatial data environments[9]. Oblong Industries was incorporated in July 2006 with Thomas Wiley, Kwindla Hultman Kramer, Kevin Parent, and Underkoffler as co-founders and Mary Ann Norris, Carlton Sparrell, and Paul Yarin as key early leaders.
Underkoffler delivered a talk[10] at the 2010 TED conference in Long Beach in which he introduced some of the principles and philosophy of spatial computing, illustrating the concepts with his earlier MIT work as well as with a live demonstation of g-speak.
Boeing, IBM, Aramco, and other customers often built substantial infrastructure and facilities around g-speak [11]. Oblong developed an in-room and remote visual collaboration system called Mezzanine in order to offer the multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device capabilities of its technology in turn-key product form[12] [13]. The company sold hundreds of Mezzanine units, installed around the world.
Ongoing work
[edit]Following a reverse merger that saw Oblong publicly listed, Underkoffler exited the company and formed Treadle & Loam, Provisioners LLC to return to directly designing and building radical new UIs.
Architectural-scale interaction
[edit]Under the TLP banner, he and his colleagues have built a series of speculative and commissioned room-scale, multi-surface, and collaborative spatial information systems. These include
- Tamper (in collaboration with Jennifer Fong, Blake Tregre, Kyle Thomas Miller, and Andy Milburn), a cinematic remix system that enables participants to extract individual in-motion characters, props, vehicles, bits of scenery, etc. from scenes scattered across a library of films and arrange these together into a living cinematic collage.
- ETITC (Everything That Is The Case; in collaboration with Alessandro Valli), an interactive system for navigating massive visual datasets (e.g. an art museum's permanent collection of tens or hundreds of thousands of objects) via 'associative attribute swinging'.
- Codename Edsel (in collaboration with Henry Griffith and Kyle Thomas Miller), an extensible framework for performing geospatial interrogation of dense, geographically-tagged statistical data with multiple simultaneous and connected cartographic and tabular representations available for user-driven layout.
Animist operating system
[edit]On 1 May 2024 he announced[14] a participatory effort to build a new operating system called Animist.
Personal
[edit]He is married to Jennifer Fong, an indie film (e.g.) producer and community organizer. Their son, Parker Loris Underkoffler, is an animator and director.
References
[edit]- ^ Halle, Michael W; Benton, Stephen A; Klug, Michael A; Underkoffler, John S (1 July 1991). "Ultragram: a generalized holographic stereogram". Proc. SPIE 1461, Practical Holography V. 1461: 142. Bibcode:1991SPIE.1461..142H. doi:10.1117/12.44722. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
- ^ St-Hilaire, Pierre; Benton, Stephen A; Lucente, Mark E; Jepsen, Mary Lou; Kollin, J; Yoshikawa, Hiroshi; Underkoffler, John S (1 May 1990). "Electronic display system for computational holography". Proc. SPIE 1212, Practical Holography IV. 1212: 174. Bibcode:1990SPIE.1212..174S. doi:10.1117/12.17980. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
- ^ Underkoffler, John Stephen (1991). Toward accurate computation of optically reconstructed holograms (SM thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/13914.
- ^ underkoffler, john. "imatec 3d lenticular camera" (video). vimeo.com.
- ^ Underkoffler, John; Ullmer, Brygg; Ishii, Hiroshi (July 1999). "Emancipated pixels: Real-world graphics in the luminous room". Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH '99. pp. 385–392. doi:10.1145/311535.311593. ISBN 0-201-48560-5. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
- ^ Underkoffler, John; Ishii, Hiroshi (May 1999). "Urp: A luminous-tangible workbench for urban planning and design". Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems the CHI is the limit - CHI '99. pp. 386–393. doi:10.1145/302979.303114. ISBN 0-201-48559-1. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
- ^ Underkoffler, John Stephen (1999). The I/O Bulb and the Luminous Room (PhD thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/29145.
- ^ Mone, Gregory (2006). "Hollywood's Science Guru" (PDF). Popular Science. Archived from the original on 12 June 2024.
- ^ Chmielewski, Dawn C (31 May 2006). "High-Tech Sign Language Could Replace the Mouse". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
- ^ "Pointing to the future of UI". ted.com. February 2010.
- ^ Takahasi, Dean (16 November 2018). "How Oblong helped IBM build its 'immersion rooms' with giant displays". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2 January 2025.
- ^ Kozlowski, Lori (26 March 2014). "The 21st Century Workplace: Mobile, Together, More Like Sci-Fi, And More Like Us". Forbes. Retrieved 4 January 2025.
- ^ Ward, Tom (March 2019). "The mind behind Minority Report is giving PowerPoint a sci-fi overhaul". Wired UK.
- ^ underkoffler, john. "original animist announcement". Retrieved 3 January 2025.