Sixth Sense In Your Pocket

Did you know that your personal computer is deaf and blind? But don’t worry because students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, Media Lab have designed a magic wand for you. Well not exactly a magic wand but a gadget which has the ability to bridge the gap between the digital and the real world, and bring the tangible and the intangible together in such a fashion that your PC acts as your Sixth Sense.

Students, with the help of Pattie Maes, an associate professor at MIT, have created a gadget named as Sixth Sense which can easily bring the digital world to the real and help you understand the world in which you live. Where the five senses stagnate, that is when the human digital “sixth sense” takes the charge.

The rapid speed at which technology is advancing has become uncontrollable. Access to information is not a hassle, but access to easy and relevant information is not always in our hands. Sixth Sense is one such gadget which can provide you with easy, relevant and important information. This information cannot be obtained directly from our five senses. Thus, Sixth Sense gadget, which is yet to hit the market, has completely mesmerized the technological world with the magic it performs.

‘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.

Now the question arises how exactly a gadget can work like a magic wand. Well the gadget which costs less than $350, comprises of a simple camera which acts as the eye, a pocket projector and a mirror. All these components are combined together in a pendant like mobile wearable device. The projector and the camera are connected with the help of a cell phone.

“All the work is in the software,” says Dr Maes. “The system is constantly trying to figure out what’s around you, and what you’re trying to do. It has to recognize the images you see, track your gestures, and then relate it all to relevant information at the same time.”

The camera captures the movement of the thumbs and index fingers. Thus capturing user interaction and analyzing the situation. The software installed inside then searches for information relating to that situation and that is when the projector comes in the scene. This projector does not require any special surface for projection purposes. Anything can be used ranging from the wall, the floor, if nothing is available then ones hands can also be utilized as the projectors surface.

“Other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in ‘Minority Report,’ it can really let you connect as a sixth sense device with whatever is in front of you. You can use any surface, including your hand if nothing else is available, and interact with the data. It is very much a work in progress. Maybe in ten years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant,” Patty Maes said.

The eye of 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.

Life cannot be much easier. If you need to make a call bring your palm right in front of the camera, numbers will appear. If you need to know the time, simply draw a circle on your wrist and there you are with a digitally projected wrist watch. Taking a photo was never this easy. All you have to do is make a square frame it with your fingers and let the software do rest of the work and take pictures for you. If you are confused about which book to buy then bring the book right in front of the eye of the camera and wait while it present all the views and reviews of that particular book and projects its ranking on the internet.

Sixth sense easily recognizes objects around you, thus displaying information and helps you access them in the simplest way possible. For when an acquaintance comes in front of you, sixth-sense projects all the information of that person right in front of you which is available on the internet. For example if that person has a public profile or a blog or a website.

But do we really need such devices interfering or you can say changing the way we use gadget and utilize technology in our everyday life. It is like technology has taken complete control and we are mere followers in this respect. Can you even imagine what exactly your PC would look 10 years from now? Well it may be some chip incorporated inside your brain working along with your entire biological system; you will no longer be human but a machine being controlled by another more powerful machine. Well yes we can conclude by saying that we are but SLAVES of technology.

But on the other hand the students working on the Sixth  Sense do not believe that this technology will replace PCs, Laptops or smart phones instead it will only help in some aspects where “desktop or laptop can’t do, which is quickly put information right where I want it to be, right on a wall or a newspaper in front of me.”

Well just imagine during rush hours, dozens and hundreds of people checking their emails on the walls etc? With people projecting their personal information everywhere, will it be feasible?

At which Dr. Pattie Maes said: “Well, I think it might actually be more socially acceptable than those Bluetooth earpieces people use these days. At least with our system you can actually see that people are interacting with information, instead of watching someone that looks like they’re just talking to themselves on a street.”

Well now it has also been in the news that various mobile phone makers are ready to launch a cell phone with a projector in them. How will this simplify their product is yet to be discovered. What we are waiting for is which mobile brand launches such technology first. First we had Iphone but what exactly do we have next?