SixthSense - The Story
You stroll along the empty street thinking or better, sulking about how boring life can be. A tall dude walks by with a rather weird demeanour. You shrug off with your usual who-cares attitude only to stop dead on your tracks. The dude is actually reading from The Daily Prophet! Just when you rush to grab a hold of him to ask where in the world he found the daily newspaper featured in the Harry Potter series in which the pictures actually move, he disappears. Now here’s something intriguing at last! Crushing the mundane cigarette butt under you feet, you rush in hot pursuit of this dude who supposedly dropped out from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Thus begins the most interesting, unforgettable days in your life. The guy apparently settles beside a lonely bench and the rest of the day is etched in your memory forever. ‘SixthSense’ - this is not the movie starring Bruce Willis. It is an ingenious invention by an MIT Research Assistant and PhD candidate, Pranav Mistry. The conjoining of the physical world and the virtual world, though long dealt with in Japanese cartoons and comic books, never did become a tangible reality. But now, this concept is not just an array of pixels in the TV screen, but rather a palpable object that can be experienced. And it doesn’t take the brains of Einstein or the riches of Bill Gates to operate it.
How does it work?
So, what exactly is SixthSense anyway? According to the inventor’s website, it is a gestural interface that is wearable which can augment the real world with digital information and enable us to use simple and natural hand gestures “to interact with that information.” The technology actually makes “the entire world your computer”. How does it do that? The world as we know it, is so full of unexpected turns and things worth taking notice. Be it an insignificant piece of paper at the park bench or a treasure map to the Lost City of Gold, even the tiniest object this world shelters is worth learning about. Well, to do so, you can argue, all you have to do is take your laptop or iPhone along and use the internet and presto, all the information is right in front of you.
But these gizmos can tend to make us feel a bit confined with their LCD screens and confusing array of other lineaments. SixthSense gives you this freedom - the freedom to feel and touch digital information and interact with it using simple gestures. It can make information available to your anywhere, without the restraint of the medium. The prototype of SixthSense consists of a camera, pocket projector and a mirror that are designed such that they are wearable like a pendant. There also is a mobile computing device which should be placed in the user’s pocket and a set of coloured markers which serve as visual tracking fiducials worn at the user’s finger tips.
The camera is designed to recognise the user’s hand gestures which is captured in the form of video stream data. A software program processes this data and tracks the location of the coloured markers at the tips of the user’s fingers using “simple computer-vision techniques“. The projector’s job is to project information visually on any flat surface, be it walls, the user’s palm, news papers, etc. So, you can walk about wearing the device, look at say, the day’s newspaper and view live video streamed right into the surface of the paper.
Through the eyes of SixthSense:
The SixthSense system is capable of displaying an analogue watch by just drawing a circle on your wrist. It has a map application that lets you navigate the map on any surface, zoom in and out and also pan across using hand gestures. For the user of the SixthSense the entire world is a canvas, where he can draw literally on any surface. How about that, eh? Wouldn’t it be magical if you can conjure a whole new world out of your imagination in front of you? Then there is a gestural camera using which you can take photos of the scene that you’re looking at! What is more, you can also browse through your photos on any surface. Icons drawn in the air can serve as interaction instructions for SixthSense. The magnifying glass symbol and ‘@’ symbol take you to the map application and mail box respectively.
Pranav Mistry, the brain behind this device, hails from Palanpur which is in the northern part of the Indian state of Gujarat. He has apparently made his creation ‘open source’ which means that anyone can get a hold of the software from him and build their own hardware. In an interview with the Press Trust of India, brainy Pranav said that he felt it was hard for “these kind of things to market in some sense” and that he did not want his invention to comply “with some of kind of corporate policy”. “Rather than waiting for that time to come” he added that he wanted people to make their own system. “Why not?” is what he asks. We have one word for you, Mr Mistry: Bravo.
Photos courtesy: www.pranavmistry.com
