The 6th sense: a wearable gestural interface.

These are no breaking news, but I think is a very nice example of the convergence of the digital and the physical world.
The Media Lab at MIT has developed a wearable computer interface, they call it the 6th sense, and according to what it does, this name makes a lot of sense...
As Patti Maes, the director of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the Media Lab, and Pranav Mistry, the student behind the project, say, in the real world we get information through our five senses. But the access to all the digital information available online is limited to the screen of our digital devices.
The 6th sense seems to be able to bridge the gap, becoming a link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world... "bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer" (wow! too pretentious? well, time will tell!)

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The projector enables us to use any surface or object as an interface by projecting the information on them. And the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures (by tracking the fingertips of the user) and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.

In the video we can see Pranav Mistry taking pictures using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which would be saved to his mobile phone. He can then project the images onto a wall and begins to size them using similar gestures to those used in a touchable interface. And if he wants to access his email he just need to draw an @ and project his email onto any surface around him... All this is already pretty cool, since it brings the interface to the physical world and allows a more natural user interaction, but what I find really amazing is the way it would bring us information about physical objects that is available online. In the video, we can see how the device projects real time information of a flight onto the boarding pass; a video providing more information onto a newspaper... And their protoype costs only 350$

More about this (info and more videos)