It's frustrating to always watch films like The Minority Report and Iron Man II where characters zip through their ultra-productive days, leveraging exotic interfaces that perform the toughest tasks and ease.  And they even look cool using these visualizations to boot.  But when the movie light fades, you're off to your car with its boring old dash display and probably will greet work the next day in front of the same boring old UI.

Fortunately, the brains at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (MIT-CSAIL, for short) have created [video] a real life exotic interface that uses a gaming console that you might find in your family den or living room.

Using ROS ("an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot") and libfreenet ("a lower-level API for sending and receiving messages over a Freenet connection, and for reading and writing raw data streams"), and an off-the-shelf Xbox 360 with Microsoft Kinect, MIT researcher Garratt Gallagher has created a system similar to The Minority Report's hand driven GUI.

The Microsoft Kinect can "see" the position of your fingers and palms, allowing you to control your floating GUI with ease.  You can resize images, move them around, spin them, delete them, scroll down a list of images, or relegate images to a special tray in the demonstration.

There's probably a few questions on your mind now.  First, why didn't Microsoft think this up in the first place?  Well, give the folks at Microsoft some credit for designing as impressive a piece of hardware as the Kinect -- that made life for Mr. Gallagher a whole lot easier.  But hopefully Microsoft does take note and decides to scoop up this idea and add it to the default Kinect bundle.

Your second question might be, how did this MIT researcher come up with such a intriguing GUI?  Well his creation is perhaps less than surprising, given that the design team for The Minority Report and other typical futuristic flicks are full of MIT alumnis.  For example The Minority Report leveraged the talents of MIT Media Lab alumnus John Underkoffler and former MIT architecture dean William J. Mitchell.