Nawon Choi— Looking Outward-08

John Underkoffler

EYEO 2012— John Underkoffler

For this week’s Looking Outward, I watched a lecture by John Underkoffler titled “Animating Spirit”. John is an interface designer and CEO of oblong industries. His company’s mission is “to provision the world with new computing forms of genuine value and durable worth, forms profoundly capable, human, beautiful, and exhilarating”. He is based in Los Angeles, California, and received his Ph.D at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences.

His work largely focuses on creating novel, “human-first” user interfaces. This is really fascinating to me and I admire the way he pushes the boundaries of the existing technologies and interfaces that are used today, and pushes his team to design novel ones. In particular, I really like one of his projects called g-speak. G-speak is a spatial operating environment and novel computing platform that allows designers to collaborate with other users and design spatial, distributed applications across multiple screens and platforms.

g-speak enables the development of multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device, spatial, distributed applications.

His lecture was very engaging because of the way he explains complex concepts and ideas in understandable language to someone who may not be familiar with the jargon. I also enjoyed the way he came across as very approachable. He mentions at the beginning how nervous he is, which adds to his charisma when he calmly and eloquently delivers his lecture.