A little glimmer of 2019 today

A few days ago I posted a link to the Microsoft Vision demo for 2019, with Minority Report-like capabilities. A new video came out today from the TED conference, where a very talented researcher unveiled Sixth Sense, a MIT Media Labs device. This device, made from off-the-shelf components retailing around $400, allows users to project a display on any surface and interact with the display.

I’m not really doing it justice here in describing it, take a look yourself :
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

It is obviously still pretty rough, but there are some really nifty nuances already present. The “drawing a clock” to see the clock feature is pretty neat as well as the Amazon book review from the title.

What they didn’t show, which is what I imagine is the “trick” is that each of the applets involved are likely specially coded for the context. The Timekeeper application is specifically waiting on the user to draw a circle to display the time. The Airline ticket application is specifically waiting for an image matching its notion of an airline ticket to show up. Likely it only works for a single airline’s ticket. I expect these sorts of things from a show and tell. Of course, there could be a front-end app that lets you choose the context you are in, sort of like the iPhone’s launcher.

I’d be interested to see where the processing load is occurring. I imagine that it isn’t happening on the phone, but is instead being relayed to a networked machine.

In any event, the future creeps ever closer.

[edit] Another interesting TED link: Siftables

~ by shaunkime on March 10, 2009.