Technology Can Now Give You SixthSense

Do you watch movies? Well, I do! Sometimes the science fiction in some movies makes me laugh (out loud) but now it doesn't... Those ambitious fictional scenes can pave way for some really amazing tech. You might have watched movies like The Island, The Matrix, and others with pretty awesome modern technology. MIT has made one of those imaginations a reality. MIT Media Lab's new invention is an awesome wearable gestural interface. It has mixed taste of Google Glass, Augmented Reality and many other hot technologies.

Photo Credit: Sam Ogden

'SixthSense' is 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. -Pranav Mistry

Using SixthSense, one can interact with real world using simple devices and do many amazing things like real-time quality check of products, take a picture and manage the files using only hand gestures with any screen. With SixthSense, every surface becomes a screen!

Technology

SixthSense is composed of:

1. A camera
2. A projector
3. A mirror
4. Colored caps
5. Mobile phone
6. A genius mind to combine these things

This beautiful mind is of Pranav Mistry, a student at MIT who is the person behind the SixthSense technology. SixthSense is associated with technologies like gesture recognition, image capturing, image processing and manipulation. And costs only $350!!!

Working

SixthSense uses the camera and the mirror to record gestures with the help of four colored caps. The user has to wear these colored caps on tips of his/her fingers to help the camera record the gestures more efficiently. The projector simple does its work by projecting the images on any surface, it may be a table, a wall or even a hand. Everything becomes a screen with this pocket projector. The user has to hang the camera and projector in his neck. All these components are interconnected using a mobile phone device, where the real magic happens! The camera captures the user's hand gestures and the colored caps. The software in mobile phone recognizes these gestures along with the distance and relative motion of colored caps to understand the command, performs the desired work and then the projector shows the result on the surface. All this happens in the blink of an eye but it took him eight long months to build this.

What It Can Accomplish

SixthSense has countless application and it is one of the crucial breakthroughs in the history of tech. Using mobile phone's internet access, SixthSense is capable of giving its user useful information about the object its camera detects. It can take a picture using hand gestures and can edit those pictures. It can help us make decisions like which dress to buy by using its intelligent feature of quality check which is supported by the internet. It can help book reading. Similarly, it can enable real-time news reading, a person can remain updated all the time by watching news right on his palm! SixthSense is also loaded with a bunch of smart gestures which are a specific command/input to the software. It's drawing panel can revolutionize augmented reality and artificial intelligence.
There is also an online guide available if you are interested in making it yourself. The instructure for making your own prototype can be found here.

Appreciation

Pranav Mistry is an MIT student and a technology innovator. His marvelous invention, SixthSense, has become an internet sensation. He has received many awards and adulation as a recognition to his efforts and his genius. His fabulous invention helped him win Popular Science Invention Award and Innovator Under 35 Award.

Sources:

• Pranav Mistry
• TED