Sixth Sense Technology

Check out this demonstration of Sixth Sense Technology, developed by Pranav Mistry at the MIT Media Lab. It’s a great demonstration of an augmented reality-like application. Sixth Sense consists of a camera and a projector, which the user wears. The camera recognizes objects, and the projector displays something over top of it. For some applications, the user can also wear sensors on his or her thumb and index finger, to trigger the technology to do something merely by gesturing. For example, it can snap a photograph if you make a rectangle with your fingers. By tracing a circle on your wrist, it will display the time. You can display your photographs and documents on any wall and move them around, as in Minority Report.

While Sixth Sense Technology doesn’t quite meet the technical definition of augmented reality since the image is literally being projected on top of the object in “actual” reality for anyone to see – rather than superimposing a virtual image via a screen that only the user can see – it is the most impressive augmented reality-like application that I have seen thus far, and is proof of concept of some of the applications that will be possible in the near future.