Move Over Tom Cruise: GE Invests in Minority Report Technology

March 14, 2012

Some of the memorable scenes from Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report involve the actor Tom Cruise facing a large transparent computer screen and manipulating images and data at a distance with his gloved hands. The scene is set in 2054 but the technology is here today. It was developed by Oblong Industries, a Los Angeles maker of gesture-based operating systems.

GE is a customer and investor in Oblong, whose technology has roots in research done at the MIT Media Lab. Last week GE said that it invested in the technology company through Energy Technology Ventures (ETV), a GE partnership with NRG Energy and ConocoPhillips. GE Digital Energy also licensed Oblong’s technology for its Smart Grid analytics software as part of GE’s ecomagination Accelerator program.

The $20 million ecomagination Accelerator program is a spin-off from the $200 million ecomagination challenge. Accelerator uses GE as a growth platform to scale the offerings of leading start-up companies and funds commercial pilots in key growth markets like the Smart Grid, in addition to equity investments.

“We seek to invest in brilliant innovations that solve real problems with a talented team that can execute. We found that in Oblong,” said Kevin Skillern, managing director of GE Energy Financial Services and an ETV representative. “Their groundbreaking technology has the potential to fundamentally change how we interact with and act on data.”


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  • shanshan

    super cool.. this technology will matter.

  • Richa Fell

    OMG This is AWESOME …….

  • Bradford Miller
  • Murugadoss

    Innovate this technology in CAD/CAM side too… you can seize the market and will change the way engineers design the products. Engineers no longer need the mouse and keyboard.

    @murugadossb

  • Dev Pal

    The goal of technology is to make hardware invisible. Cloud Computing is one of those frontier. Microsoft Kinect is another. This is the third kind.

  • Nelson G

    I wonder why Rytheon dropped this. Perhaps the military didn’t buy in on the idea. The articles from The Wall Street Journal and the New Scientist magazine that Bradford cited above, mention the creator of this technology who is the Chief Scientist in Oblong Industries.

  • Thomas

    Interesting area for GE to explore – for an equally fantastic technology that may be closer to GE core business – chech out the work being done with autonomous flying robots at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab.

    http://www.ted.com/speakers/vijay_kumar.html

  • Maha

    Amazing Technology, great to see it is coming to reality. We could find no of application that could use this potentially. Way to go.

  • Raji

    I loved “Minority Report” and Im loving this even more…This is fantastic.>!!!

  • Greg Hallee

    I take it we are talking about technology that moves data around on screen? And I assume we are not talking about three savant type individuals floating in a zero gravity pool offering-up extra sensory perceptions of events that are about to happen?

    Does anybody respond to these?

  • jeff

    Apple has already made the mouse confusing enough by all their swipe gestures…this would be even worse.  Can you imagine how many different gestures you would have to learn just to be able to do the simple operations we perform effortlessly with a keyboard and mouse?  I do not see this as being a huge time saver, and consequently not a game changer either.