Analyzing Reality in Motion with the Least Effort

ctor Tom Cruise is a cool guy. In Minority Report, he shines as a hard-boiled fighter against evil. He is cast as a policeman in the year 2054 – and as you would expect from science fiction, he is surrounded by a huge amount of high tech. But looking at the movie today, only 14 years after its premiere, there are parts of the vision of the future that don’t look very advanced. In a scene that seemed very futuristic back then, the actor moves his hand to open screen windows on a glass wall that serves as a monitor. He stretches and shrinks the images with finger motions, then conjures them away with a brisk swipe. That looks stylish, but when he does so he is wearing a black glove with luminous dots – a data glove. And today scientists simply grin at that. This principle, where Tom Cruise controls a computer with a data glove, has been around in movies for about 20 years, and is still being used for new productions. A person is filmed wearing a whole bodysuit with markers that a computer can use to follow – track – the position of the head, body, arms and legs. This enables the movement to be transferred into a scene in a movie of a computer world, for example, to animate a fictional figure in a human way. But this kind of tracking is complex. Actors have to struggle into gloves and a full bodysuit.