The Tom Cruise-driven vision of a future (almost) completely without murder worked with the concept that if we could use precognition to know when a murder was going to happen in the future, we could prevent it from ever happening. It was a science fiction concept that has tantalized the imagination on different levels with other concepts introduced in the film. Floating visual computer interfaces and iris-recognition technology aside, the crime-fighting components are well out of reach. Or are they? According to this infographic, we may actually have somewhere to go with all of this using…

The year is 2054. While preventing murders before they happen is the plot device driving the movie “Minority Report,” one of the most memorable aspects of the movie was the way that advertisers found and targeted people. As people passed by virtual billboards, retina scanners would identify them and target ads specifically to their needs. Is this close to the reality of our not-too-distant future? That’s the question that our friends at BuySellAds tackled when they put together the infographic below. First, take another look at the scene from the movie: Augmented reality. Facial (and eventually…

Remember Minority Report? If so, what about that scene where Tom Cruise is controlling a computer with hand movements that synced up to opera music? If your memory is fuzzy see it here. Well, the computer from that scene is actually a reality and has been in development since the early 90s. Who knew? Oblong Industries, the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment, actually worked on the set of Minority Report so there is a reason for the similarities between the machines. The whole thing works with an I/O bulb, which looks out at the world and can tell the computation device what is going…

Even though 2002 wasn’t that long ago, when Minority Report launched then, the futuristic interfaces it showed seemed decades off. But it seems like they’ll be here much sooner than we think. Case in point: this video of the prototype Bonfire uses a system of cameras, lasers and mirrors to create to basically turn the space on your desk next to your laptop into a usable interface. What makes the Bonfire project so interesting is that, rather than being a standalone interface like a touchscreen, it’s instead meant to augment your existing keyboard and mouse. The system projects images onto your…