This TED demonstration of SixSense, a new concept in augmented reality technology, Pattie Maes of the MIT Media Lab, spearheaded by graduate research assistant Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED.
'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. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted in a pendant like wearable device, 'SixthSense' sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects we are interacting with. It projects information onto surfaces, walls, and physical objects around us, and lets us interact with the projected information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or our interaction with the object itself. 'SixthSense' attempts to free information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.
COMMENTARY: Pattie Maes is an Associate Professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and Associate Head of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directs the Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces research group. Previously, she founded and ran the Software Agents group.
Prior to joining MIT's Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She holds bachelor's and PhD degrees in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. Her areas of expertise are human-computer interaction, artificial life, artificial intelligence, collective intelligence, and intelligence augmentation.
Maes is the editor of three books, and is an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. She has received several awards: Newsweek magazine named her one of the "100 Americans to watch for" in the year 2000; TIME Digital selected her as a member of the Cyber-Elite, the top 50 technological pioneers of the high-tech world; the World Economic Forum honored her with the title "Global Leader for Tomorrow"; Ars Electronica awarded her the 1995 World Wide Web category prize; and in 2000 she was recognized with the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council.
Pranav Mistry is currently a Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. Before joining MIT he worked as a UX Researcher with Microsoft. He received a Master in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and Master of Design from IIT Bombay. Pranav completed his Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Pranav is from Palanpur, a town situated in northern Gujarat in India. Pranav is a brilliant researcher and appeared in a TED presentation in India.
During his engineering work in computer science to his masters studies in design, Pranav has worked on a varied fields like interaction design, robotics, computer graphics, HCI, AI, information graphics, Embedded systems, social computing, and many others. He explored the fields with different projects and research papers. Here are some of the numerous projects he has been involved with include:
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