» SixthSense Technology Bridges Gap Between Digital and Physical World

As you can imagine, the BOALT office is full of technology nerds. Everyone has their own little device or site that they follow, but consistently the thing that many of us overlap on is the Technology, Entertainment, Design or the TED Talks.Their slogan is simply: Ideas worth spreading. So I’m taking a cue from them and spreading this. They release a new TED talk almost weekly, sometimes we miss them but when we do see them, they definitely blow us away because each presentation is always groundbreaking and thought provoking.

The one that stood out in the office this week was from Pranav Mistry and his SixthSense technology. Essentially Mistry has created a combination camera and projector unit call the SixthSense device. The unit enhances the physical world with digital information.

The camera on the SixthSense device will determine what physical object you’re looking at or holding and then project digital information onto the object. You can then interact with the digital information through a series of hand gestures. Confusing?

The best example from the video is a woman walking around; then she sees something she’d like to photograph. She simple holds her hands in front of the object. She then frames what she wants to photograph with her fingers and the unit’s camera automatically takes a photo and stores it to be edited later.

The hand gestures mimic some of the gestures used on our iPhones and other multi-touch devices. The biggest difference is the touch screen is the air. Mistry’s goal is to bridge the gap between our digital and physical lives. A lofty goal for anyone. The uses that Mistry demonstrates seem straight out of science fiction. He made a phone call on the palm of his hand. He played Pong on the subway and watched a video of a press conference given by President Obama right on top of the news article of the same news conference.

The limitation that I can see with his existing design is the quality of the projection. Most of his examples are in facets of our life in which quality of image is most important: movie watching and photo editing. Obviously this is only step one but as the technology improves and the quality of the product advances, the uses are endless. It’s an amazing first step towards integrating our physical world with our digital future.

Tags: iPhones, MIT, Pranav Mistry, SixthSense, TED