MIT’s “SixthSense” Adds Greater Interactivity to Life
MIT’s “SixthSense” Adds Greater Interactivity to Life: ”
Given reality’s inherent limitations - saddled with realness and only able to offer us information that we can intuit from our five senses - it’s no wonder that more and more people are turning to their increasingly complex mobile devices to rediscover that zest they once had for life, hoping to add another layer of meaning to their experiences in the world. But what if that capability was already at our fingertips? Thanks to an ongoing MIT project called ‘SixthSense,’ the future is now - albeit a bit clunky - and life just got a lot more interactive. Their about page explains:
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.
Although still in the early stages of development, the SixthSense is further blurring the lines between the digital and the actual, providing users a way to access the wealth of data existing solely in the online space and seamlessly integrate it into their physical environments.
Pattie Maes of MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group recently spoke about the prototype at TED:
(Via PSFK.)
