We have senses. Born with them. We use each and every one of the in our day to day lives and manages to do basically everything that needs doing. Right? Who needs a SIXTH SENSE when we can already do what needs to be done. Wrong!
Pranav Mistry, an exceptional student from MIT, has invented what he calls our “Sixth Sense” and basically describes it 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.”
Just image when you go shopping. No longer do you have the hassle of comparing prices manually. Just use your “Sixth Sense” to do all of that for you and even include prices from neighboring stores. Want to take pictures when you’re on holiday? Hold out your hands in the shape of a photo frame and “Sixth Sense” will take that photo for you. Meeting new people? Let “Sixth Sense” remember them for you so that when you see them again, you already know everything about them. The possibilities are endless!
“The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. 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.” – Pranav Mistry, excerpt from http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/
Posted under Technology
This post was written by Derik Nel on November 17, 2009
