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The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Pranav Mistry

TED · 5.5M views · 2009-11-18 · 15:20

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Overview

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.

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Mostly cited as the origin of ideas later commercialized by products like Humane's projector, and sometimes as a demo that never took off.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2016–2023

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What people said

prakhar897 · 2021-08 · Recommendation

Here's mine: 1. Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams [LINK] 2. Strange answers to the psychopath test | Jon Ronson [LINK] 3. The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Pranav Mistry [VIDEO] 4. Steve Jobs MIT Class: What he learnt after he was fired from Apple? [LINK] 5. Eric Liu: Why ordinary people need to understand power [LINK] 6. Peter Lynch 1994 Lecture [LINK]

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fidotron · 2023-10 · Reference

This looks like an attempt to commercialise the ideas in [VIDEO] Projectors have a killer problem which is they aren't very bright, and those that are bright enough to be useful are dangerous to everyone nearby.

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dagmx · 2023-04 · Reference

After all the hype, it seems almost anti-climactic that the demo is so similar to what Pranav Mistry showed with SixthSense in 2009 [LINK] [VIDEO] Granted, over a decade later a lot of the tech is in place to do this at a higher fidelity. But the same core issues remain: privacy. People don’t want what they’re up to, to be projected for everyone to see at all times, whether that’s visual or audio. Yes, people can look over our shoulders today to see our phones, but it’s much smaller, and therefore harder to snoop on. the same goes for audio, I don’t want to blast my audio out so everyone can hear either. Imho this will be an interesting novelty stepping stone on the way to more practical waveguide displays in glasses. Where I can have higher privacy, with audio projected to my ears. Yes, people can see the waveguide activations and hear the audio, but they’d have to be incredibly close to discern the same information as this, just due to proximity/scale

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