Augmented reality finally seems to be coming to the real world. In an amazing demonstration of the possibilities, Pranav Mistry and Patti Maes of MIT Media Lab show how simple off-the-shelf components can be put together to make your own wearable gestural interface.
Called Sixth Sense, the device consists of a camera, a pocket projector with mirror and a mobile phone. The phone remains in the user's pocket, and uses visual input from the camera and the projector acts as the monitor. It can be programmed to recognise hand gestures and virtually any surface can be used as a screen.
With these basics in place, Sixth Sense can seamlessly plug in information from the virtual world to the real world. For example, a person browsing through a new bestseller at a bookstore can project Amazon ratings and reader reviews right onto the book and make instant decisions on whether to buy the book or not. You can check your flight timings by just holding the ticket in front of the camera. The system will scan the ticket and retrieve the current status from the Web, through the mobile phone's data connection.
An extremely interesting application of ubiquitous technologies, Sixth Sense has amazing potential to change how we see and interact with the world around us. By supplementing the real world with meta information and an easy-to-use interface, this is one technology that really lives up to its name. [Sixth Sense demo]
Sixth Sense - Virtual information, real world
Change is good
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” - Charles Darwin
Some people hate change. They just can't let go of the familiar and even bother to try and learn something new. Evolution takes care of them.
ZDNet's Ed Bott gives a good example of change in the technology world. In his Microsoft Report blog, he recounts how his colleague gripes about the user interface changes in Windows 7, the latest version of the operating system, which is still in development. As Bott himself notes, you can't please everyone. But to all those people who keep on complaining about how they have to keep up with the changes in software or hardware or everytime their favourite website has a new design, just remember Darwin.
Google Suggest, now with ads?
Google seems to be experimenting with ads in their search box, which will pop up as soon as you start entering a query. According to this SearchEngineLand article, the ads seem to be in test phase, and may not be implemented at all. They may be just testing the waters to see how users react, but this is surely an indication of how much pressure even Google seems to be facing in the current economic downturn. For a company which has kept its homepage free of any paid ads, integrating commercials right into the heart of its product is a big step.
Judging by the number of people who come to this blog, searching for ways to turn off the Google Suggest feature in the search engine's homepage, it may not be their most popular feature.
It will be interesting to see how the users react if they do indeed start ads in the search box. Maybe people will just grin and bear it, realizing that good things do come at a price, or maybe we will see some migration to Yahoo and Live search engines, which have been dwindling in market shares with every passing month. Google may have just given users an excuse to try them out after all.
