Pranav Mistry: Of sixth sense and digital life

BANGALORE, INDIA: The concluding session of the two-day EmTech India 2010 conference that focused on emerging technologies and innovation, was taken by Pranav 'Sixth Sense' Mistry, the researcher in fluid interfaces group at MIT's Media Lab.

And naturally, the inventor of Sixth sense talked about digital and real life - the use and understanding of cloud in a common user's life, how the present life of every user is divided into two distinct worlds; physical and digital world.

He said that the elements of a physical world is comprehended easily, while the digital world is understood by just a handful of people. “We all know how to use a hammer and what it is made of, while when it comes to a cellphone we face so many problems with the technology and keep calling the call center.”

He added, “There are two worlds physical and digital that receive gesture input and digital input respectively.” He explained that at MIT Media Labs he has been constantly working on ways of decreasing this gap between the two worlds, bringing them together, on how gesture can be received by digital world.

Pranav gave various examples of his works like the first gesture input device that he built in 2000, which was made by extracting the roller of the mouse and understand the movements to feed to the PC.

He also talked about the Quickies, which was made by sticking an RFID tag on the sticky note paper. By sensing the movements of the pen/stylus on the paper, the RFID sends the input directly to mobile/PC and can be sent as an SMS to the mobile, or to the PC as a reminder.

Another technology was the Akshara, which he said was developed during his days at Microsoft. This software could read vernacular language and helped in feeding the command to the PC or mobile in Hindi or any language.

Based on similar concept, Pranav worked on Third eye, where specific eye glasses will show specific information to the users. For example in an airport of Japan, people watching television can read the messages/news in their language, an American can read English, while a Japanese would read in his language. Even one television screen can show different shows at one time. The glasses would determine what the user wants to see from the same shared television screen.

Coming to sixth sense, Pranav said how the products would work as the keyword, like just by placing a coffee mug over a smart map, the map would show the places to purchase that. He shared that he is working on cutting down on the hardware for the technology. The present projector is as big as a pendant, while he plans to make it as small as a button.