Technically Personal!

Prepare yourself. This will blow your mind off. Assuming you haven’t yet read or seen this video by Pranav Mistry, a genius working on the Sixth sense technology which uses Augmented Reality concept to super imposes digital information on the physical world.

This small device which can be worn around the neck like a pendant consists of inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware. Two cables connect an LED mini-projector and webcam to a Web-enabled mobile phone, but the system can easily be made wireless as per Pranav. All the boring informational stuff will come later. Let us first jump into this amazing video. Make sure you watch it till the end. Video is courtesy TEDIndia.

If you are not lost after watching the mind-blowing video and still around, let me tell you that this prototype costs approximately $350 to build. The bigger news is, as Pranav mentioned in the video, the digital Sixth sense technology will be made open-source very soon!

For whatever reasons you couldn’t watch the video, here is a brief-up on what the video is all about.

The Sixth sense mobile computing device you see in the image on top is installed with software that analyzes the gestures and the objects captured by the camera so that it can respond and provide the appropriate information. For example, Mistry traces a small circle on his wrist using his index finger, SixthSense will project a watch onto his wrist:

There are many more gestures that the device recognizes – drawing a magnifying glass projects a map application, while drawing the ‘@’ symbol lets the user check his/her email. SixthSense can also interact with everyday objects, like in the image below where it reveals that the flight which the user has a ticket to is delayed.

And here we see SixthSense providing Amazon’s rating for a book on the book’s cover itself:

Sixth sense can pull out the videos related to the latest news you are currently reading on the newspaper:

Amazing, plain awesome. The possibility of actually having such a device in the real future is what blows my mind off. Not just Tom Cruise (in Minority Report), even we can have and use such a device!

Pranav Mistry, who hails from Palampur, a small town in Gujarat, India, Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. Before joining MIT he worked as a UX Researcher with Microsoft. You can know more about Pranav ‘Zombie’ Mistry and the latest on Sixth sense.

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