“Sixth Sense” Technology Introduced @ TED
This is what you get when you combine a portable video projector, a camera and a cell phone that has access to the Internet and the ability to process visual information for you. Simply amazing! Click on the video below to see a demonstration.
As cool as this technology is, I have to say that I think it’s already up against some stiff competition from smart phones like the Google Phone and the iPhone. For instance, the video shows a demo of evaluating different kinds of paper towels for the user so they can pick out the one that is the most environmentally friendly. A somewhat similar application that already exists on the Google Phone (and others before it in Japan) is a program that allows you to use the built-in camera to scan the products UPC barcode, which would then give you an instant price check for that product at local stores and even through online merchants.
It would take little effort to expand the capabilities of the above smart phone application to allow for sorting of the search results to be prioritized for other criteria besides price.
The key feature that the projector/camera technology does have that you can’t easily do with a cell phone is the ability to project visual data onto any surface and interact with it in 3D space via hand gestures. While there are a lot of unique uses for this, a drawback of this is that you are required to have a usable surface in front of you in the first place, and I think (for now) the LCD screen of a smart phone has the upper hand in that department. For instance, you could be walking down a street at high noon and look at a building (like some sort of historical landmark) but not have a usable surface to project meta-data on to (although I suppose something could be read to you through an ear piece). On a cell phone, the screen is much more visible in nearly any lighting and given further software development, all kinds of information could be overlayed onto a camera captured video stream as seen below:
The end goal in both of these technologies is pretty strait forward: Overlay relevant information on top of the real world. And between these two technologies, I have to say that I think smart phones still have the upper hand… for now. Even though smart phones don’t have the freedom of using hand gestures to operate your phone, it could be argued that multi-touch screens are comparable (for things like zooming on maps, photos, etc.).
What I think the real knockout advantage of a cell phone (besides the fact that an LCD screen works as a better display surface than most real life objects) is the fact that information is presented to you in a more private, personal fashion. If you were to have personal information projected out, anybody nearby could eavesdrop on whatever is being shown to you. For example, you wouldn’t want your online bank statement to be projected on to a wall when you’re surrounded by strangers at an airport. It’s more personal to have such things confined to a smalls screen that you have more control over. Then again, the idea is to use a cell phone as the core processor of the system, so in the event you have to look something personal up that you don’t want projected, you would just take your phone out of your pocket and do whatever it is that you need to do.
A bold prediction is made at the very end of the first video: That we will one day have the ability to augment digital information on reality through some kind of brain implant. While such a wild technology is still a long ways away, it will likely occur within a couple decades time and the development of this is only the first of several steps towards a technology we once thought to be impossible.
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009