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Pattie Maes, director of the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group, demonstrates the work of student Pranav Mistry at the TED conference last month in Long Beach, California. 08:42..

Its name is more catchy than accurate, but the technology deserves the standing O the edgy TED audience gives this work:

Sixth Sense 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

Wearing little finger caps -- multicolored nail polish would also work -- and a small battery-powered projector, Pranav Mistry scans toilet paper and sees a green light on the package if it fits his pre-determined criteria; in a bookstore, he gets a book's Amazon rating projected on its cover. When he opens the book, he can read comments about it.

And when he opens a blank newspaper, today's news and moving pictures -- video -- appear on it.

To make a phone call, he projects a phone's buttons on any available surface -- his hand will do -- and treats the image as the object it projects
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If he wants to take a photo, he makes a frame with his fingers and his camera takes a picture. Back home, he can project his photos on a wall and resize them by pulling them out with his fingers in the air. Pantomime is as good as action.

At a conference like TED, as a person approaches you can read a tag cloud about who he or she is, what they're working on, where, what they like -- all projected on their chest. (Imagine a different set popping up in a nightclub.)

The camera, which tracks the finger caps, a small projector and mirror are worn around the neck. These communicate with the phone in his pocket, which also communicates to Amazon and other sources, does the computations and of course functions as a phone.

There is integration of elements and sources, but no extra-sensory perception -- the device does not sense what it can not see., as we understand a true "sixth sense" would.

Nevertheless, in a smaller and more refined form, it will be a natural extension of all the isolated pieces of hardware and data we now have that don't communicate well. You are the hub of your information sources, wherever you are. Pranav has done the hard part; it's now up to designers and engineers to miniaturize it and make it look cool.

Convenience and interlocking the pieces make it a killer app.

 Tags  cool tech future tech MIT Media Lab

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