[guru3d] Would You Like To Have A Sixth Sense?

1967 Views 20 Replies 20 Participants Last post by Lyshk0, Mar 16, 2009

K3VL4R

Discussion Starter · Mar 12, 2009

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Would You Like To Have A Sixth Sense?
By Thorsten Finck, March 12, 2009 - 7:07 PM

How about getting a sixth sense? Impossible, you say? Well, maybe not, if you're getting some help from MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group. SixthSense is the name of a device Pattie Maes, associate professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and founder of the Fluid Interfaces Group, presented at this year's TED, an annual conference that brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers. Pranav Mistry, Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, is the "brain" behind SixthSense, who actually designed and implemented the whole system.

Take a cellphone, a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. Put everything together so that you can wear it like a pendant around your neck, and you're almost there. Now, use the cellphone to connect you to the information avaliable online. Et voila. You just created a wearable gestural interface that lets you use natural hand gestures to interact with that information - your SixthSense.

Here is how it actually works: "The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while 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 userâ€™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."

Some, already working, applications for which you could use the SixthSense are: "The map application lets the user navigate a map displayed on a nearby surface using hand gestures, similar to gestures supported by Multi-Touch based systems, letting the user zoom in, zoom out or pan using intuitive hand movements. The drawing application lets the user draw on any surface by tracking the fingertip movements of the userâ€™s index finger. SixthSense also recognizes userâ€™s freehand gestures (postures). For example, the SixthSense system implements a gestural camera that takes photos of the scene the user is looking at by detecting the â€˜framingâ€™ gesture. (...) The SixthSense system also augments physical objects the user is interacting with by projecting more information about these objects projected on them. For example, a newspaper can show live video news or dynamic information can be provided on a regular piece of paper. The gesture of drawing a circle on the userâ€™s wrist projects an analog watch."

Another amazing thing is that the current prototype system costs approximate $350 to build.
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Now you can avoid that using cell phone while driving fine by using sign language.

This seems to me like one of those gateway technologies that will lead to great things to come. Good work MIT.

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