Sixth Sense
At the recent TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference a presentation was given by Pattie Maes of MIT that showed The Sixth Sense, a portable information device that could change the way we interact with all types of information.
Comprising of just a camera, projector and mirror and linked to a mobile phone. Here’s how it works…
“The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.”
…clever, huh?
We all carry mobile phones, Blackberrys and countless other digital devices and are all connected to the digital world in some way but there is no link between this and the physical world. What the Sixth Sense does is to take digital information and make it accessible in the tangible world by allowing you to interact with information on almost any surface. Simple hand movements allow you to carry out many commands, for example taking a picture with the ‘framing gesture’, and then emailing that picture by drawing the @ symbol.
Here’s a demonstration video:
Here’s the presentation itself from Pattie Maes:
At the moment this is just a prototype so don’t expect to see it on the high streets for a while yet. But what is amazing is that this prototype system only costs about $350 (£210) to build!
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration. Initially an annual conference, the scope of TED has expanded to include a bi-annual global conference, a humanitarian prize, and free audio/video podcasts of extraordinary talks.
