Who wouldn’t want to trigger their sixth sense, if it is as easy as wearing a pendant around your neck? With this ground breaking invention from Massachusetts Institute of Technology you can do just that if you are willing to spend a meager $350. Soon you will check emails on your palm or a nearby wall, show pictures to your friend standing next you in a crowded street or take snaps with your bare hands.

The project pet named “Sixthsense” is the brain child of Pranav Mistry an Indian Grad student at MIT and his project guide Pattie Maes, at MIT Media Lab. In Pranav’s words “‘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”.

How does it work?

A miniature camera captures your hand gestures that are communicated wirelessly to your mobile phone, which in turn processes your signals and connects to the internet. A small, but powerful projector will project the results back, which are reflected by a mirror to any opaque surface. In short, the hardware consists of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera all compressed into a wearable pendant. Simple! The software mostly tracks the user’s gestures using computer-vision based algorithms.

At the recent TED India conference held in Mysore in November 4 – 7, Pranav announced his desire to open-source his project.  Mistry pays tribute to his architect dad for his innovative spirit.

Read more about Mistry and his revolutionary project here and in this article that appeared yesterday (Nov 8, 2009) in The Hindu.