Elevating Interactivity

Wow, the ramping up of Schematic Touch has been a lot busier than expected, and this blog has clearly suffered from a lack of time. But I’ve been making lots of notes about relevant items so I’m planning to post about a lot of the things we’ve missed over the last few months.

One that I missed from even longer ago was MIT Media Lab’s Pattie Maes presenting Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense at TED back In February.

Sixth Sense is a wearable computing device that allows the wearer to perform a number of different activities using multitouch and gestural interactions similar to those used on multitouch walls and tables (of which we have written about many.) A key difference here is that those interactions are performed with an image projected by the wearable device onto any surface – a wall, a table, an object, the wearer’s hand, etc. That allows the device to completely mobile, unlike environmental elements like walls that are anchored in physical spaces.

The mobile nature of Sixth Sense opens up a lot of potential application scenarios that take into account the wearer’s changing environment and location. It basically combines the gestural UI paradigms of multitouch surfaces with the contextual nature of mobile phones. That creates a lot of room for exploration.

Of course the downside is that it’s a wearable device. Maes and Mistry’s team seem to have done a good job of mitigating the cost factors of wearable technology by utilizing fairly inexpensive components, but various other barriers to adoption remain. Not least of all is the geek factor of wearable computers.

This is still in the prototype phase, of course, but as you will see in the video and the top image, as demonstrated it depends on colored markers that the user must wear on the tips of their fingers. That probably increases the hurdles to any widespread adoption. But it’s still a very compelling convergence of technologies that is worthy of further exploration. I look forward to seeing what Maes and Mistry (or someone else entirely) do with this next.