It’s been nearly a year since MIT Media Lab students cobbled together a couple of ordinary gadgets to invent the extraordinary. The device, called SixthSense, is powered by routine commercial products and works with simple hand gestures. If it catches on, SixthSense with its ability to turn any surface into an interactive touch-screen can potentially reduce the multi-touch hoopla of Apple and Microsoft to the mere footnotes of the history of technology.

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A prototype of SixthSense was unveiled by the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT's Media Lab at last year’s Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Boston. This breakthrough gesture-driven device is wearable and seamlessly channels internet information into daily routines, augmenting the physical world with digital information. The software of SixthSense searches the internet for information that is potentially relevant to a certain situation, and then the projector takes over.

"Other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in 'Minority Report' it can really let you connect as a sixth sense device with whatever is in front of you," said Pattie Maes of the lab’s Fluid Interfaces group. According to Maes, a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn’t come from our five senses but from computers and the internet. Maes adds that the SixthSense research is aimed at creating a new digital "sixth sense" for humans. “Maes’ goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses,” informs Kim Zetter in his wired.com report.

What Is SixthSense Made Of?

The components used in the gizmo include a regular web camera, a battery-powered projector and a mirror, all connected to a smartphone. All components are cobbled together in a ‘pendant like mobile wearable device.’ Signals from the camera and projector are relayed to smart phones with Internet connections. The hardware used cost less than $350.

How Does SixthSense Work?

How SixthSense works is best described by Pranav Mistry himself, an MIT graduate student working on the SixthSense project, on his website.

“The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. 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’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.”

What Can SixthSense Do?

SixthSense pushes gesture-driven digital responses to the limits. Simply draw the @ sign with your finger in the air if you want to check your emails on the wall. Use the same finger to draw a circle and see the time in the image of analog watch that appears on your wrist. Make a picture frame with your hands to take a digital photograph. With a look at your airplane ticket, SixthSense can tell you whether or not your flight is on time, as well as the reason of delay.

SixthSense can recognize items on store shelves, retrieving and projecting information about products or even providing quick signals to let you know which choices suit your tastes. The device can even recognize books in a bookstore and then project reviews or author information from the Internet onto blank pages.

The camera in SixthSense serves as a digital eye seeing what you see. This feature helps you in situations like reading newspaper articles which SixthSense recognizes and retrieves the latest related stories or videos from the Internet and plays them on pages. "Let's say I'm in a bookstore, and I'm holding a book. SixthSense will recognize that, and will go up to Amazon. Then, it will display online reviews of that book, and prices, right on the cover of the book I'm holding." says Pranav Mistry.