SixthSense: A Slice of Genius
Our last post on the Future of User Interface focused on John Underkoffler as he showed a TED audience the technology he has been developing for 15 years. He showed how by using intuitive hand movements, we can sift through information in 3 dimensions, transfer data from one mainframe or work as a team to deconstruct an engine. 5 years, he enthused, is the amount of time we can wait until we can expect it to enter our homes. A time period that looks like it could shrink when we take the brilliant Pranav Mistry into consideration.
A research assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, Mistry has taken further steps into the future of interface. His dream is to bridge the gap between the real and the digital domains. He feels agrieved on two fronts. Firstly, he believes that todays systems are not portable enough. Secondly, that our computing technology is not intuitive enough. So he has gradually developed ‘SixthSense’, which combats these issues on both fronts It 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. A highly intelligent miniature camera, mirror and pocket projector system ingeniously turns flat day-to-day surfaces into computing platforms and via an intelligent search engine which can read what it sees and cross-reference online, todays newspaper can work as a mini TV or live weather report. The possibilities are endless – subway walls, phone dialing on a hand, playing pong on the tube. Mistry wants people to bring computing with them everywhere they go without the limitations of devices such as a mobile phone.
On the topic of making computing more intuitive, Mistry says this on his personal website:
A conceptual gap exists between the representations that people use in their minds when thinking about a problem and the representations that Computers will accept when they are programmed. For most people learning programming, this gap is as wide as the Grand Canyon . invent is my research project under the guidance of Prof. Ravi Poovaiah initiated with the vision to help solve the same. I have taken children as my users. The initial goal of invent is to design an intuitive programming environment for children. The key ideas are to use representations in the computer that are analogous to the real world objects being represented or letting children create them and to allow those representations to be directly manipulated in the process of programming. The child can create objects, give them properties and attributes & use those objects to create their world creating challenges & solutions to them. invent is an attempt to make programming more like thinking.
For the moment, we eagerly await SixthSense as it continues to develop and enter the mainstream.
found your site on del.icio.us today and really liked it.. i bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later
found your site on del.icio.us today and really liked it.. i bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later
[...] magic stretch screens, household user interfaces and desks with user screens. With projects such as Six Sense making breakthroughs regularly and major inroads from tech experts such as John Underkoffer, it [...]