Pranav Mistry & Pattie Maes presents the SixthSense ; a wearable interface which augments the physical world around us into digital information with the use of hand gestures to interact with the information.

A very intelligent interface working on the lines of the five senses that we human beings use to perceive information. The SixthSense technology 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.

The current prototype system costs approximate $350 to build.

The SixthSense presented by Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry at TED 2009 conference.