So in a way the vision they put forward was a summary of the state-of-the-art of futures thinking at that time (2001), albeit seen through an MIT lens.

There’s a whole range of ideas in there from transport to biometrics as well as the user interface stuff, but the movie was so huge that I guess we could point to Minority Report as being a recent entry point for gestural interfaces into the techno-social imaginary. In the UK there was even a campaign of TV ads by M & C Saatchi that emulated the gestures stuff pretty closely, featuring a young woman dressed in a tight-fitting black suit, in some kind of call centre of the future, answering queries by waving her hands around in space. The tagline of the ads was “The Future for Less”. I found them quite funny, but there’s no arguing with the penetration of TV advertising.

Article by Lanier: http://www.21cmagazine.com/minority.html

Some MIT blurb: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/underkoffler-0717.html

Cinema.com Production notes (scroll to half way): http://www.cinema.com/articles/1025/minority-report-production-notes.phtml