I just watched this TED talk:
Pattie Mays and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense
There is no doubt that the student creating this device is a genius. The difficulty of creating algorithms to read, recognise and make meaning of an image in front of it beyond that of a barcode or similar pictorial representation is incredible.
That said, I'm no too sure of the actual implementations of this product. At the moment you have a camera with a projector around your neck to make any flat surface nearby into a screen. This is interesting, but in my mind nt incredibly useful. Especially since you are forking out the cost of a phone for your phone to do all the computing anyway, without using all the tools that your phone already has.
Take the shopping uses, for example. You have to make sure the camera is pointing in the right direction, make the correct hand gestures and then you need a surface to display the information you're receiving from your projector, also around your neck. Or, you could get out your phone, take a picture with its inbuilt camera and do exactly the same thing in (I bet) the same time or less and get the same answer for $300 or whaever it was less.
When I'm out and taking photos, I want the photos to be deliberately aimed, zoomed and shot. I want to be able to see exactly what I'm taking before I take it, like with any existing camera. This doesn't allow that. A camera hanging around my neck is precarious, it moves and sways as I move. It turns around. It's not practical.
The software is cool, there's no doubt about that, but the hardware is, in my mind, unconvincing. Johnny Chung hs done some amazing things with similar technologies with what, I think, are much more usefl educational outcomes, although as wth this the implementation is, at the moment, a bit ugly and buggy.
It just seems to me that this is adding hardware to do what I can do already with the hardware in my pocket.
Also, at the end of the talk Pattie Maes, as she was leaving the stage, she said that 'Maybe in ten years we'll be here with thte ultimate SixthSense brain implant'. If this is what they're aiming for then I'm not at all interested.
As for the implications to the future for designers of interactive multimedia, I'm not sre that there are, at the moment, any differences. As I stated above, I don't see this technology achieving anything beyond what is already very achievable just with a phone. I'm more than happy to be shown that I am wrong about this.
These are my intial impressions.
What do you think?
