The Next Big Annoyance In Loaded Trains
SixthSense presents the narrow escape for old media. As digital spaces seem to take over a lot of functions that used to be present in public space, augmented realities now bring this digital world back into real. SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.
“The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.”
For written media in general this means the possibility to connect with all the good stuff of the web in a relatively pleasant way. It differs from the known augmented reality techniques since the interference of a mobile phone is not needed. Instead, the modern ‘homo digitalis’ wears a projector.