Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry Unveil “Sixth Sense” Technology at TED

On February 4, Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group were the talk of TED2009 when Pattie demo’d their Sixth Sense technology. The technology was developed on hardware available today. The total hardware cost was around $350. The system gives the user fast access to a wealth of information.

It is amazing to think of the direction some of the technology is going, but there are also some worrisome privacy aspects that the commenters brought out on TED’s posting of the demo. It’s all so Minority Report, really, but I have to have it.

Points of Interest:

Privacy and etiquette- Would the user really want to use the application that scans someone’s face, searches the web and projects a tag cloud on that person’s chest? Just seems like it could be kind of rude and off-putting to the person being “tagged.”

Consumer product research- How cool would it be to comparison shop and display the prices on the nearest wall for the salesperson to see. Ever been in a car purchase negotiation and wanted to see what Edmunds.com had to say about a particular feature? I know, you could do that on your smart phone, but it’s so much cooler to be able to project it on the cube wall while the salesperson is “taking your latest offer to the sales manager, even though he’s just going to kick me out of his office.”

Cool factor- Do I really have to wear Magic Marker caps on my fingertips or multi-colored nail polish on my index fingers and thumbs?

Flight status- Digital Nomads who fly often do not need to be sold on the ability to see if their flight is late, on time or gate changed just by scanning the bar code on the ticket.

Newspapers 2.0- Users can hold the newspaper in front of the webcam and get videos of a published story that are projected right on the newspaper.

Book reviews- You can hold a book up to the camera and get Amazon reviews projected onto the pages.

No doubt digital nomads will be among the first to adopt this technology. Do you have a sixth sense?

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