TED
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2016–2023
15:20 · 5.5M views · Nov 18, 2009
Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.
Mostly cited as the origin of ideas later commercialized by products like Humane's projector, and sometimes as a demo that never took off.
4 comments from Hacker News
Here's mine: 1. Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams [LINK] 2. Strange answers to the psychopath test | Jon Ronson [LINK] 3. The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Pranav Mistry this video 4. Steve Jobs MIT Class: What he learnt after he was fired from Apple? [LINK] 5. Eric Liu: Why ordinary people need to understand power [LINK] 6. Peter Lynch 1994 Lecture [LINK]
After all the hype, it seems almost anti-climactic that the demo is so similar to what Pranav Mistry showed with SixthSense in 2009 [LINK] this video Granted, over a decade later a lot of the tech is in place to do this at a higher fidelity. But the same core issues remain: privacy. People don’t want what they’re up to, to be projected for everyone to see at all times, whether that’s visual or audio. Yes, people can look over our shoulders today to see our phones, but it’s much smaller, and therefore harder to snoop on. the same goes for audio, I don’t want to blast my audio out so everyone can hear either. Imho this will be an interesting novelty stepping stone on the way to more practical waveguide displays in glasses. Where I can have higher privacy, with audio projected to my ears. Yes, people can see the waveguide activations and hear the audio, but they’d have to be incredibly close to discern the same information as this, just due to proximity/scale
Here is something that never took off. And never will despite the popularity of this video. this video The difference? Selfie stick does exactly what it says it does and isn't more awkward, lowres, latency prone or difficult to use than a normal person would expect.
This looks like an attempt to commercialise the ideas in this video Projectors have a killer problem which is they aren't very bright, and those that are bright enough to be useful are dangerous to everyone nearby.