Sixth Sense Technology and the Possibilities for Future Devices
It has been a few years now since Microsoft announced their Surface technology. Touch technology, access to data, game functionality, etc., etc. It all sounded interesting if only it were not so terribly expensive and equally removed from being anything that could be confused with being portable. Of course since then mobile based technologies led by the ubiquitous iPhone abound, but a team over at MIT is attempting to take things to the next level with what they are calling the "Sixth Sense." The team points to the Surface-like touchpanel that Tom Cruise's character fingers throughout "Minority Report" to explain it, but since I don't recall much of that I'll stick with the MIT company line on Sixth Sense instead. They describe it as,
"A wearable data device that paves the way for data-rich interaction with the world."
Now this sounds an awful lot like a modern cell phone, but the concept of Sixth Sense is different from this. What the working prototype demoed at this year's Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference displayed was an attempt at direct tactile interaction with data in real life situations. The portable set up consisted of a collection of devices, including a mini projector, a camera, a cell phone and color-coated finger tip covers. With the right image recognition or marker technology attached to items users want to know more about, Sixth Sense could project set pieces of information anywhere using cell phone's access to the Internet for data gathering, and/or through the combination of projection and input recognition via finger tip attachments, allow users to input commands to search for a variety of related information. The examples used in the demo included product resources accessed and projected on the products themselves in the supermarket and content, like Amazon.com book reviews, called up through contact with a physical book copies. The device also will/would associate certain programmable hand gestures to specific tasks, such as taking a picture of the contents of a user's framed hands and projecting the current time in a specific spot. Nice, no more watch.
Interesting stuff this, and because of its portability and price -- estimated at not much more than $300 or so -- much more achievable on a large scale than Surface. But at the same time, it would also be very reliant on image recognition and marker technology, which the Surface uses and involves chip insertion into all items in use. Also, at the end of the video below the MIT speaker, Pattie Maes, makes a comment about a brain implant being another step in the unit's development. Whether she was kidding or not, myself not being quite ready for the hive mind, I don't think that would ever be a wise move, but if this technology ever became a reality at any level just think how it might alter personal electronics as we know them.
Take a look the the video below and see what you think:
--Tom Milnes
Michelle McCormack on April 05, 2009 at 12:55 PM
This got me thinking about meta data in general and my own meta data specifically.
What would my tag cloud be? What do I want it to be? Are those the same? Can I manipulate my own meta-data through some kind of ‘optimization’. Do I have to really optimize my life or can I simply spam myself with all kids of keywords ala ‘black-hat seo‘?
You hear people talk about the artificiality of the Internet, but what’s really happening, through data mining and impossible to get away from transparency, is that it’s becoming harder to get away from the reality of ourselves.
http://www.Twitter.com/MichelleMMM