Sight. Sound. Smell. Touch. Taste. The five senses. As integral to us as the very air we breathe. They are at the heart of how we perceive the world, how we make decisions and communicate. But human kind has also amassed reams of knowledge, now stored on the internet, that we regularly access using our mobile phones and computers.
The remarkable SixthSense prototype joins up all that 'found' data, with the more intangible information gained from our five senses, so we can interact with it in a natural, intuitive way using hand gestures. So how does it do this?
SixthSense has a mini projector, a camera and a mirror worn around your neck. These connect up to a mobile computer that sits in your pocket. Any surface from a wall to your hand, can be projected onto, to be your 'computer screen'. The camera recognises and tracks your hand gestures and other objects around you.
On your fingers you wear coloured markers (red, green, blue and yellow on your thumb and index fingers), so the camera can track and stream the movement of your fingers. It looks like this...
Just some of the things it can do are projecting live news reports onto a newspaper...
Resizing and sorting photos using a framing gesture on a wall...
Or using your hand as a mobile phone interface...
We must admit, SixthSense has blown our minds a little bit. You see, when we use a laptop or mobile phone, we are physically adapting our own movements to the machine so we can get to the information we need. But with SixthSense we can use natural movements and gestures to do the same thing, all the while combining it with the constant blips and whirrs we're receiving from our eyes, ears, tongues, nostrils and skin.
We admit, there's a touch of the Hollywoods here with allusions to the film Minority Report, but using our bodies in such an expressive way in relation to what is essentially dry old meta data, is a huge leap forward in the way we communicate with each other and perceive the world around us.
We love it. And if you do too, then trust us, you'll be hooked by the video above, unveiling SixthSense and what it can do, from TED.com.
