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Dial By Hand (Photo: Lynn Barry)

MIT sees information as our sixth sense, and their goal is to integrate information with the real world in a much more effortless way than we do today. The SixthSense project at MIT Media Lab has developed wearable mobile technology that recognizes hand gestures and then projects information on to real objects. For example, if you want to call someone, you make a gesture and the device projects a phone number pad onto a wall, your hand, or whatever is close by. You then “touch” the number pad image to start dialing.

Sure, we carry around the entire Internet with our smart phones, laptops and tablets. But we still need to interrupt the flow of our interactions to go search for information. The SixthSense project looks to eliminate the phrase “hold on and let me look that up.” They are doing this by combining several emerging technologies:

• The device has a camera suped up with advanced recognition technology. The device takes in the world around you and recognizes words, objects and even faces.
• A mobile processor linked into the Internet so that it can search, analyze, upload and download the information you need.
• A projector to display anything from search results to pictures, movies and generated graphics onto object in front of you.
• The ability to understand your hand gestures. It does this by tracking different color caps on your fingers. In their demo, they use pen caps, but they also say you could just paint your fingernails different colors. (more…)

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Augmented Reality is looking to explode into our lives and change how we experience…well…almost everything. But the real power will come when Augmented Reality converges with other emerging technologies.

If you can barely handle the reality you have, you better hang on to your id, superego, and basic hold on the world. Here comes Augmented Reality and it looks to change a how we relate to everything around us. At its core, Augmented Reality isn’t that weird of a concept. It basically means that you take a real video or image and you overlay computer generated images. We’ve seen this in movies, commercials and advertising for years. Heck, I can do this on my Mac without too much trouble.

Where it starts to resemble something that would have made Gene Roddenberry proud is when you start adding technologies like mobile, GPS and the power of the internet to give you instant, personally relevant information.  For example, a company called Layar created an application that lets you look at city streets through the view finder in your mobile phone and overlays icons of local shopping, restaurants and point of interest. So, if you’re hungry, pull out your phone, pan the street and look for the pizza and hamburger icons to lead you to lunch.

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