Would You Like To Have A Sixth Sense?

How about getting a sixth sense? Impossible, you say? Well, maybe not, if you're getting some help from MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group. SixthSense is the name of a device Pattie Maes, associate professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and founder of the Fluid Interfaces Group, presented at this year's TED, an annual conference that brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers. Pranav Mistry, Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, is the "brain" behind SixthSense, who actually designed and implemented the whole system.

Take a cellphone, a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. Put everything together so that you can wear it like a pendant around your neck, and you're almost there. Now, use the cellphone to connect you to the information avaliable online. Et voila. You just created a wearable gestural interface that lets you use natural hand gestures to interact with that information - your SixthSense.

Here is how it actually works: "The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user