Okay, maybe not, but Mitch Kapor, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and generally near-prescient entrepreneur is sending the resources of Kapor Enterprises in that direction.
Kapor currently serves as the Chairman of the Board for Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. One of the biggest complaints about virtual worlds--and we'll skip the tired flying penis jokes--is that it's hard to navigate in a 3D environment using a mouse and keyboard. His solution is to use a 3D camera to register movement and let users ride their avatars as if they were riding Segways.
Video of developer Phillipe Bossut flapping his hands to fly after the jump.
It may look a little strange at first, but you have to remember what the mouse must have looked like when Douglas Englebart first introduced a wooden contraption with wheels as a computer input device in the early 1960s. To the engineers that grew up with punchcards and slide rules, it probably seemed about as silly. That's why (along with some technological considerations and the pervasiveness of the consumer PC) we didn't see the mouse become truly mainstream until the Macintosh hit in 1984--twenty years later.
And, to be fair, that's a problem the developers understand.
"While it might be too early for users, it seems to be the right moment for us, software developers, to be thinking about what we could do with them and help guide the industry in our modest way so that when those cameras come out, there’s something useful to apply them to," Bossut explained on the Handsfree 3D blog.
Part of the issue is to make the device more consumer friendly. The technology is out there, but it's expensive and the interface is unwieldy. Others are looking in the same direction, though. See, for example, a similar effort for the PlayStation 3's Eye, a $30 peripheral:
Kapor's interface (with a camera developed by 3DV Systems) isn't ready for the market yet, but he's already looking towards the future.
When I saw him speak at the Metaverse Roadmap conference at Stanford in February, he didn't even have the demo. But when someone asked what form a consumer-level interface for virtual worlds would take, he just picked up his MacBook Air and pointed at the camera.
[via Virtual Worlds News: here, here, and here; via Handsfree 3D]
