Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab demos a phenomenal device in this TEDTalk, the Sixthsense. The Sixthsense uses natural hand gestures to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world. I actually found another TEDTalk by the genius behind the Sixthsense, Pranav Mistry, that goes into more depth of the capabilitites of his invention…I had to watch them both twice (okay, three times).
This technology just absolutely blows my mind although I happened to notice that both of these presentations were made in 2009, so I became curious as to what, if anything has been done to further develop the SixthSense. My search lead me to the site, Quora a social question and answer site, which had some interesting information regarding SixthSense.
There are many theories as to what has happened with SixthSense since 2009, some say Pranav only enjoyed the creative process and did not want to follow through with the business of product development. Others said that SixthSense was a doctoral project and nothing more, research. Still others said that the MIT Media Lab’s major contributor/sponsor is Microsoft and that the technology is being further developed by Microsoft for a project called LightSpace.
Whatever is going to happen with SixthSense, what really kind of scared me was Maes’ last comment in her TEDTalk, “who knows where we’ll be in the next ten years, maybe we’ll be here with the ultimate SixthSense brain implant.” So where are we going with this?
Musings of an MILS student 