Follow your "sixth sense"

By: Maryssa Barras

I know what you’re thinking, and no, this is not the movie. SixthSense is an up-and-coming technology created by Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Media Lab. SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface, which means that you an wear a computer and interact with it using hand gestures.

Pranav Mistry came up with the concept a few years ago, and in 2009, when the first prototype was released, it won the Invention Award by Popular Science, and Pranav won the TR35 2009 Young Inventor Under 35 Award.

SixthSense is fairly simple. Its hardware consists of five individual devices, a camera (or webcam), a projector, a mirror, a microphone and a mobile computing device, all connected together.

How does this work, you ask? Well, the wearer puts the connected hardware around his/her neck, with the camera and projector facing outwards, and then he or she puts color markers – basically anything that would give your thumbs and index fingers different colors, like wire tape – on their fingers. The user would then turn on their device and compute away.

It works exactly like any other computer or laptop, only you can take it anywhere. For example, if you were walking home and saw a nice landscape you wanted to take a picture of, all you’d have to do is stop, turn in its direction and make a rectangle with your thumbs and index fingers. Or, if you wanted to surf the Internet, just turn and face a wall, flick you fingers, and on comes the projector with a full desktop projected on the wall. Done. Easy as that, and you are in full control.

With the new year, you can always expect a lot of new technology, and although SixthSense is not available on the market, there are step-by-step instructions on doing it yourself, as well as official beta software issued by the inventor, available online for those of you who are really tech savvy, and all for about $350.