Here’s a fun UI demo from Japan that takes us a step closer to the kind of interface we saw Tom Cruise use in Minority Report. Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa of the University of Tokyo has developed something called an ‘AIRR Tablet’, which – if I understand correctly – uses a retro-reflective sheet to create a display that seems to be floating in the air. Then by using the high-speed vision technology for which the lab is now rather famous, the system can receive user input such as hand-writing in the air. The exact details are somewhat tricky to grasp (they aren’t the most clear), but the demo video below is rather cool. Coincidentally, this is far from the only writing-in-air technology we have looked at recently (see here and here for more). Fun stuff here in Japan!