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MIT Researchers Create a Cheap "6th Sense" Device
thefickler writes "MIT researchers have combined a mobile projector with a webcam and mobile phone to create a device that draws information from the environment. For example, the gadget recognizes products on store shelves and can provide product and price comparison information. The sixth-sense device was cobbled together from common parts costing just $300. While the gadget is not being primed for mass release, it represents a forward-thinking way of blending technology with our environment."
Further analysis shows that the heart is actually a team of codemonkeys madly devoting all waking hours to understand the hundreds of different data formats needed to supply even the most basic integration.
Seriously tho, the main cost to developing this would be getting integrated with all the different potential data providers. Recognizing a physical bar code is easy. Looking up the current price at nearby retailers? More difficult.
I read an article in the past year about a different "sixth sense" experiment. They made a belt of cellphone-type vibrators, then controlled them such that the northmost vibrator was activated. In essence a built-in compass. Subjects quit noticing the vibration after a few days. Within a few weeks, they had "perfect direction," and it wasn't just the ability to point north, or any other particular direction. Their sense of distance, position, etc, were all much better. The big point of the experiment was to see if an adult brain could internalize and integrate the new information source.
It could.
I want one.
Though it occasionally abandons me, I generally have a very good sense of direction. Let me study a map, get oriented, and I can usually get you there. I can usually give bearing and distance to an arbitrary destination in the general area. But I'd like my sense of direction to be PERFECT. (or darned close to it)
Incidentally, the effects persisted for several weeks after the device was removed.
There's also talk about a magnetic grain embedded in the heads of some animals. They've studied the grain, and found that it's the largest size that can naturally be a single magnetic domain. Smaller, and it gives less "signal". Larger, and it splits into multiple domains, and again gives less signal. Sounds like a natural magnetic compass to me. Maybe there's a little bit of residual prewiring in the human brain for such a directional sense, which is why the vibrator belt experiment worked so well.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Actually, humans have quite a few senses other than the five commonly described; it's just that most of them are internal (sense of hunger, etc.).
One that is external, and sometimes called the "sixth sense", is the sense of balance.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana