Founded 2006 | ||
Oblong Industries is a computer user-interface company based in Los Angeles, CA which develops conference room telecollaboration systems which respond to gestural input.
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Oblong industries on the verge
History
Oblong Industries was founded in 2006 by John Underkoffler and Kwindla Kramer. The founders and the company's technology are based on Underkoffler’s research at the MIT Media Lab. Underkoffler designed the computer user-interface system in the Minority Report (film). In 2009 Boeing's Virtual Warfare Center began adopting the technology. Oblong now sells the commercial version of that system for conference room collaboration.
Products
The company's core technology platform, which sits atop the linux-based server operating system Ubuntu as a distributed operating system, is a spatial operating environment (SOE) called g-speak. It is a software and hardware platform that combines gestural input, networking, and graphical output systems into a unified SOE to form a collaborative working environment.
The company's flagship product is a g-speak based conference room collaboration system called Mezzanine, a collaborative superset of telepresence, webconferencing, videoconferencing, and teleconferencing called "infopresence". The product is a spatial, networked, multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device (including mobile collaboration) computing environment that includes the use of a gestural interface, as well as, other traditional (pointing device) & non-traditional (iOS-based mobile devices) user-interface input devices. The non-traditional gestural user-interface is an ultrasonic tracking system composed of handheld spatial wands, ultrasonic emitters, radio receiver, and a USB interface card hosted in the system's T5600 server.