TED Lecture: Building a Sixth Sense

I just discovered (via my brother, Antoine) new favorite TED video. This lecture by an MIT researcher Pattie Maes and her student Pranav Mistry demonstrate their work in creating a device that could serve in their words "as a sixth sense". It's a wearable device - or rather an amalgamation of off-the-shelf devices - camera, projector and phone. Using the camera to perceive objects, the phone to transmit data and a projector to project the data - you can do such things as pick up an object and receive information about it via a projected image.



What's most startling about this kind of gadget, is the contrast between its simplicity and the size of its consequences. Although there is a lot of work behind the scenes in designing the computer programs, the actual hardware not only exists today but costs less about $350. However, this combination of gadgets by building on the existing infrastructure brings us one step closer to a collective mind - it makes interacting and receiving the world's collective information nearly instantaneous. There's certainly something (I'm guessing many, many) opportunities here.