TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense | Hacker News Reader

TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense

blog.wired.com

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Summary: With a mini-projector/camera around his neck, and coloured rings on his fingers for gesturing, a guy augments reality in technically impressive ways.

this guy is my friend and he always does some amazing stuff with the things we use daily and can never imagine how we can make them use in different way. hats off to you pranav.

And so it begins.

Not forgetting this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wearcompevolution.jpg

But the technology in the linked article is streets ahead.

Particularly interesting to me is that the MIT people have better ideas on what uses a wearable computer could be put to than I've ever heard of before. Assuming real life and today's technology, that is - I've heard cooler ideas in Sci-Fi.

Projecting a paint program? Useful, but not as ubiquitous as a piece of paper and a pen. Hooked up to a mobile so you could bluetooth the picture to someone else? Better. Projecting a live, dynamic map? Very ... social. Moreso than the eyeglasses wearable devices.

I really like the ideas behind their system because it doesn't require the user to wear weird glasses and things. I believe we will eventually get to that point though, when such devices become much smaller and blend in with our everyday world. This offers a much more near-term implementation that I can see fitting in with the common person's lifestyle in the next 5 years.

I have envisioned a similar system for about a year now. Except it uses a semi-transparant display over one eye and a camera mounted to that. You wear a glove over one hand and you interact not with a projected display, which I find to be shockingly impersonal, but with a 'virtual' display that could handle depth as well.

A nicer way to interact with your environment, I'd think, especially as when processors get stronger you could handle an entire virtual 3D environment overlaid over one eye.

Would it be possible to somehow have half of each eye covered instead of losing one eye completely? I know I lose a lot of information when I close one eye. Or would doing something like this be too distracting to be worth doing?

It's transparent, so the UI will cover up as much or as little viewing area as needed.

I had similar ideas, but I think it is technically challenging to produce such transparent displays so close to the eye (i.e. integrated in eyeglasses, for example). The eye can't focus in objects that close.

One solution could be doing some kind of retinal projection. You could adapt the optics in real time to compensate the eye's focus, and you would have a UI stamped into your normal vision at all times. The real problem is technology because, AFAIK, such systems are currently too big to be used in our day-to-day lives. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display )

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