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* * * Charles Arthur * The Guardian, Wednesday 16 June 2010 15.30 EDT * Jump to comments (99)
Why Minority Report was spot on
It's only eight years since Steven Spielberg's Minority Report amazed audiences with its futuristic technology. But now science is fast catching up

Tom Cruise as John Anderton in Minority Report - an early adopter of gesture-based computing. Photograph: 20th Century Fox
The launch of Microsoft's new Kinect games system, which allows players to run, jump, punch and shoot without having to wear strange clothing or hold any kind of controller, has got technology and cinema buffs alike thinking of Tom Cruise again. Specifically, the moment in the film Minority Report when Cruise, playing police chief John Anderton, tries to figure out film footage and computer data by waving his hands around in mid-air to manipulate it: turning it, shrinking it, pushing it aside, revolving it. Give it time: in a few years, we'll more than likely be controlling our computers in a similar way. 1. Minority Report 2. Production year: 2002 3. Country: USA 4. Cert (UK): 12 5. Runtime: 145 mins 6. Directors: Steven Spielberg 7. Cast: Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow, Samantha Morton, Tom Cruise 8. More on this film
When Minority Report came out in the summer of 2002 – the iPod was less than a year old and the iPhone and iPad weren't even gleams in Steve Jobs's glinting eyes – its technological visions of the future seemed mind-bogglingly cool. The film was set in 2054 (Philip K Dick's short story, on which it is based, isn't so specific), so director Steven Spielberg presumably reckoned he was giving it plenty of room for the array of cutting-edge technologies to become part of our daily life.
What Spielberg didn't count on, though, is what might be called "the Star Trek effect". If you show off imaginary cool technology in a film or TV series, then kids, teenagers and enthusiastic technologists of all ages will try their damnedest to make it come true. When James T Kirk beamed down to an alien planet and flipped open his communicator, when Spock waved his tricorder over strange life forms and murmured "intriguing . . .", when the crew of the Enterprise teleported, carried phasers, communicated with their computer by voice and carried data around on little plastic sticks, a generation looked at it and thought: that's a future I want to live in.
And so with Minority Report. In the manner of all the best science-fiction, it included numerous gadgets but didn't rely on any of them as the key to its plot, which still revolved (as was Dick's predilection) on people's ability to deceive themselves about truth, lies and reality.
For a lot of geeky fans, however, the plot was incidental to the possibilities offered by the technologies on show. And there were plenty: pre-crime (predicting that a particular person will commit a crime); iris recognition (picking you out from a crowd on the basis of the unique pattern of your iris); personalised advertising (where what you see on hoardings is targeted specifically to you); e-paper (electronic paper, for newspapers with moving images that people can read on trains); 3D video (do we have to explain this?); computer-guided cars (which follow preset patterns); spider robots (for tracking people); jetpacks; and some rather unpleasant police restraint technologies – including the sick stick (makes you sick on contact) and "the collar" (which effectively paralyses you once fitted).
Things such as gesture computing were still way off (though a jetpack had been used in the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympic Games). But, eight years on, Spielberg and his technical advisers look as though they were too cautious . . .
Gesture-based computing
John Underkoffler, the MIT scientist who created the gesture-based computing that Cruise used in Minority Report, has developed his own company – Oblong Industries – to make it real and market it. But he has already been overtaken by companies such as Apple with the iPhone, offering "pinch" and "pull" and "swipe" for pictures and text since 2007. And of course by Microsoft, both with its new Kinect games system and its table-sized, touch-screen Surface, which lets you move things around with your hands.
Dynamic iris recognition
Your iris has a unique pattern, and is already used to identify you (so long as you are standing still in front of a camera) by border control agencies in the UK, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, US and Canada. In the film, people's irises are read while they're on the move, presenting the extra challenge of movement and resolution. But with cameras and computers improving all the time, don't bet against this not being ready way before 2054.
Personalised ads
In Minority Report, the iris recognition then led to personalised ads bombarding you on hoardings everywhere. That doesn't happen offline, but you do get them – to some extent – on the net: DoubleClick, the huge advertising company owned by Google, tracks any sites you visit that use its adverts, and can tailor what ads you see to an agglomeration of your interests. Attempts by the UK web-tracking company Phorm to let internet service providers do similar things with ads, by tracking where you went online, ran into privacy problems. And don't forget Facebook, which is spookily good at targeting ads – because it has access to everything you have told it about yourself (though it insists it does not share that with advertisers).
Computer-guided cars
Arguably, the closest we will get to this is satnav systems, which are actually pretty pervasive; the market is nearly saturated, at least in the UK. However, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (which gave us the internet) has had an "autonomous car" competition – and entrants are getting better. Wouldn't it be nice if your car could drive you home after a night on the booze? Pubs would cheer.
3D video
Have you seen Avatar? Up? Sky's new 3D TV service? The new Nintendo 3DS? Done.
E-paper
Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle are a bit bulky, but lots of news organisations think they are just the ticket for electronic reading. But real "electronic paper" – bendy, able to retain an image, electronically rewriteable – is getting closer all the time. In January, the Korean company LG showed off a 19in flexible e-paper, and companies such as Plastic Logic and E Ink are getting electronics that look closer to paper all the time. Perhaps it will be a hit when newspapers stop printing. So, 2054 then. Or perhaps 2015?
Pre-crime
In the film, "pre-cogs" can look into the future and inform the police (they have got no choice – they are stuck in baths in the basement). In 2008, Portsmouth city council installed CCTV linked to software that would note whether people were walking suspiciously slowly. University researchers had already realised in 2001 that, if you recorded the walking paths of people in car parks, you could spot the would-be thieves simply: they didn't walk directly to a car, but instead ambled around with no apparent target. That is because, unlike everyone else in a car park, they weren't going to their own car.
That's not the end: Nick Malleson, a researcher at the University of Leeds, has built a system that can predict the likelihood of a house being broken into, based on how close it is to routes that potential burglars might take around the city; he is meeting Leeds council this week to discuss how to use it in new housing developments, to reduce the chances of break-ins. So although pre-crime systems can't quite predict murder yet, it may only be a matter of time.
Spider robots
The US military is developing "insect robots", with the help of British Aerospace. They actually have eight legs (so, really, arachnid robots) and will be able to reconnoitre dangerous areas where you don't want to send a human, such as potentially occupied houses.
"Our ultimate goal is to develop technologies that will give our soldiers another set of eyes and ears for use in urban environments and complex terrain; places where they cannot go or where it would be too dangerous," Bill Devine, advanced concepts manager with BAE Systems, told World Military Forum. Give it 10 years and they will be there.
Sick sticks
These have already been the object of some research: Pennsylvania State University researchers developed a system to emit ultra-bright light pulses that induce "temporary blindness, disorientation, nausea and blindness". And a company called Intelligent Optical Security has built and sold it for the US's Homeland Security organisation – so feel worried. There's no sign of restraint collars yet, although watching England play football has been known to have the same effect.