Device gives its wearer a “sixth sense”
Last updated Mar 10, 2009 — 4830 views
At last week’s TED2009 conference, two researchers from the MIT Media Lab demonstrated a “Sixth Sense” device that gives its wearer supernatural abilities. What’s next — Google implants?
“Sixth Sense” developer Pranav Mistry describes the device as “a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.”
MIT’s Sixth Sense device is built from
several readily-available components
(Click image to enlarge)
As shown above, the Sixth Sense device comprises a wearable projector, mirror, and camera. These components are controlled by — and communicate with — a mobile computing device carried in the user’s pocket. A remote computer gathers data from the user, processes it, searches the Web for relevant information, and returns the results in real time to the user.
Colored markers worn on the user’s fingertips enable gesture-based inputs to the system, while the device’s projector allows any convenient surface to serve as the system’s display.
Pattie Maes, director of the MIT Media Labs’s Fluid Interfaces Group, reports that the cost of components used in the today’s Sixth Sense prototype total around $300. Ultimately, the devices shouldn’t be much more expensive to build than typical mobile phones, she reckons.
Needless to say, the breadth of potential applications for this combination of technology boggles the mind.
In the following video, Maes introduces the Sixth Sense and describes its capabilities, while Mistry demonstrates a bit of what it can do:
Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demonstrate MIT’s “Sixth Sense” device
(Click image to play video)
Visit Mistry’s Sixth Sense website for more details on this fascinating project.
Further details on the TED2009 conference are here.
