TED2009: “Sixth Sense” device projects information on any surface, including your skin

The researchers at the MIT Media Lab are focused on human-machine relationships and on finding new ways people can use technology to their benefit. Sometimes their projects seem like the work of some wizards.

Pattie Maes’ “sixth sense” device set off a buzz when she showed it at the TED conference recently — even though it so early stage that it’s more hack then full prototype.

Maes and graduate student Pranav Mistry created the WUW - “Wear Ur World” – system using about $300 worth of store bought components: a small wearable camera, battery operated projector, a smart phone and colored plastic marker caps that are worn on the users fingers.

It’s a bit clunky — you couldn’t pass it off as jewelry — but still cool.

Maes, an associate professor, set out to create a device that would make it easy for people access and use networked information — our “sixth sense” — in making everyday decisions. The project’s website says it frees data from its traditional digital confines and “releases it into the world, seamlessly integrating information and reality.”

Photo/MIT Media Lab

What?

At TED, Maes showed users projecting relevant information, delivered from the Internet-enabeled smart phone, on a variety of surfaces. A user can manipulate the data by moving his capped fingers, which are tracked by the camera.

For instance, a user can access Amazon ratings, or reviews, about a book he picks up in a bookstore, check the status of his flight by aiming the device at his ticket or check the time on a watch face projected on his wrist.

“You can use any surface, including your hand if nothing else is available, and interact with the data,” Maes said. “It’s very much a work in progress. Maybe in 10 years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant.”

You can find out more about Maes’ work at the website of the lab’s fluid interfaces research group, which she directs, or see images of the “sixth sense” device in action.

TED2009: Siftables, cookie-size computers of the future

Imagine playing Scrabble or doing math equations with tiles that react to each other and to you. Or using the tiles to compose music. Or create a story.

Siftables were one of the coolest of several new and developing technologies shown at the TED conference last week in Long Beach, Calif.

A Siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie; each with a screen and wireless radio. They can play video and sound.

Creator David Merrill, a doctoral computer science student at the MIT Media Lab, said he was inspired by old fashioned blocks and their importance to spatial reasoning and learning.

He and his collaborators have re-imagined the computer interface, by asking what if they could replace the mouse — our “digital finger ” — with a tool that would let us “reach in with both hands and grasp information physically, arranging it the way we wanted.”

As Merrill demonstrated on stage, the Siftables interact with, and react to, each other. Tilt a block one direction to play video, the opposite to rewind it. No clicking or pushing of buttons.

One of Merrill’s most impressive applications is a music sequencing and live performance tool. Blocks are programmed for different functions — tempo, volume, percussion, lead and so on — and you arrange them to make music.

TED has just posted the video of Merrill’s 7-minute talk and demo here (sorry WordPress won’t let me embed it).

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), which draws some of the world’s leading scholars, technologists, designers and business leaders, is known for spotting future tech hits. In 2006, for instance, Jeff Han set the crowd whistling and gasping with the first public demo of his mulit-touch, multi-user interface screen. It’s the type that CNN and others used during primary and election night broadcasts to show voting trends, results and other information.

Keep an eye on Merrill and his new company, Taco Lab, which will be working on commercializing his research once he finishes his Ph.D this spring.