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MIT Grad To Make Digital "SixthSense" Open Source
yuveraj writes to mention that Pranav Mistry, the brain behind the innovative "SixthSense" application demoed earlier this year, plans to open source the technology in order to get this to the streets faster. "Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source. There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time."
Not only have the "sixth sense" used for horizontal awareness, but also vertical awareness! Imagine having the instruments being "beamed" into your head so that you didn't even need to look at the dash to know the pitch and direction of the plane?!?
This could be a GOD-SEND to pilots in both military and civil use!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Is it me, or does this expression make almost no sense? Regardless of the intent I don't get why it follows with "that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time."
Can someone translate this expression about canard?
Too slow, can't handle the G forces etc.
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no it doesn't.
If further innovation and a product are created then it will, until then this is vapor.
Pranav Mistry is already dead.
but this pretty much the embodiment of fears about privacy in the information age.
I do not have a sig. You are hallucinating.
The sixth sense is accelleration. Sensory data is provided by the semicircular canals and is interpreted as sensations, therefore it deserves the title of 'sense'. Proprioception may also qualify, even though it is a derived/calculated sense.
I give this example to my children to teach the important fact that most every person and most every textbook on Earth can be clearly and demonstrably wrong about something obvious.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
I've never gotten paid for anything I've written. I give it all away. The reward is called "Pride" As a society we simply need to find a way to make sure people like Pranav Mistry have gainful employment while they devlop things like this. As long as I have a decent job that pays my bills and afords me the time to work on software, I will continue to do so. But when employment barely pays my rent and my managers expect me to come in early and work late to the point that I have no time to do anything rewarding at all, everyone suffers because I can not continue to work on things that may or may not be profitable in the end. In my opinion the biggest obstacle in the way of innovation is profit.
What is the SixthSense project or do we need a sixth sense to figure it out?
It would have been nice to include a short description in the summary!
Ever since watching the sixth sense TED conference, I've been wanting this, but I want the light projected in something you can't see unless you are wearing special glasses. That way the person I'm tagging doesn't know I've just printed on his chest that he's an idiot to avoid.
I mean, the tech is cool, don't get me wrong. Having dealt with multitouch for some years now I get it. But seriously, would anyone want to strap on a backpack, attach a bunch of gizmos to his chest, tape colors to his fingers, only to display PRE-PROGRAMMED information? I mean, the video of him is all marketing gimmick. A preloaded video of Barack Obama on the newspaper, clever bit of camera trickery. I don't see this gaining traction anymore than those wearable computers with the little lcd screen in your eye glasses. I would rather have a system that uses Augmented Reality. This "contraption" was deemed open source by it's creator because it's creator knows no one is willing to fork over the cash to bring this to market because it's a terrible concept.
Perhaps that's too obvious? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
"I see dead people" will take another meaning.
> has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible for once and for all
Wrong. Depending who you talk to, innovation is either a great idea or a process. If it's a great idea, putting it out as open source says nothing about open source at all. If it's a process, then it hasn't happened yet, because the idea only just now got introduced as open source and there's been no time for any process at all.
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It's too bad all the people that really know how to run the country are busy writing blogs and running talk shows.
Will this SixthSense device let me see dead people? If so, I don't want to use it. I have enough problems already. I see stupid people. They don't see reason. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're stupid.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Now there's a new one. *fumbles through idiom dictionary*
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I thought the sixth sense was "Spidey". You know, that tingling one when something interesting is about to happen...
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HMD production. If it doesn't some one is asleep at the wheel. For a concept demonstration, projecting stuff onto the real world is fine, but in practice it is horrible. The missing link for effective augmented reality like this is an effective variable transparency head mounted displays. I hope something like this makes it to mass market sooner rather than later.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
The stuff that comes out of upper floors of the Media Lab generally don't commercialize well. Anyone remember Charmed Technologies? A couple of grads from the same group tried to commercialize wearable computers - the company didn't survive the bubble collapsing. The first floor of the Media Lab is different; they're more like traditional researchers and work on things like e-ink. But the upper floors generate demo after demo, that look cute and generate press, but not much commercial value.
The device is pretty cool. Of course there's a huge bottle-neck - the communications companies providing your connectivity. I'm sure they'd love a device like this as an excuse to gouge you even more on bandwidth and dig ever deeper into your pockets. So much so that the communication companies would probably make a device like this impractical. Unless you are willing to pay an extra $200/month low low "flat rate".
We need to get rid of the middlemen. Sadly that's not going to happen soon. Too bad such a creative, innovative machine is utterly impractical.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
As a grad student, MIT owns his work.
MIT does not tend to arbitrarily give away its intellectual property, particularly these days. He may discover, as a lot of grad students there discover, that what they want and what MIT wants are not the same thing. They tend to be very cooperative about licensing the work back to the grad student -- for a share of the proceeds, but cooperative licensing is not the same as being willing to give it away.
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Have you seen Tom Cruise in Minority Report? Clearly, if this makes it out of prototype, then I will look like a movie star using it. Have some foresight man!
Someone should make this device work with the "beaming a display directly into your retina" story from slashdot two weeks ago. (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/26/1845253/Companies-To-Invade-Your-Retinas-As-Soon-As-Next-Year?art_pos=1)
That way,
- You wouldn't have to carry around the projector
- The camera could be mounted to the (hopefully stylish) glasses, so no carrying that around either
- Only you would get to see your "beamed images" (people like privacy)
Plus, I imagine it works best if you can get the camera as close to your line of eyesight as possible, especially when he makes the picture frame shape with his hands to take pictures.
Give it the ability to put the projections privately in a pair of glasses, but still interact with them with hand motions where you see private projections in your glasses, and this is the kind of tech that will change the world.
Being wired isn't a problem anymore. We have wired people walking around everywhere today. It's common to see people walking around with ipod headphone wires running to a device in a pocket.
Wearing a few colored rings on your fingers wouldn't be a big deal either. Right now they're clips but I'm sure the software could be calibrated to work with rings for many of the applications shown.
The hardware exists today. The hard part would be mapping between the projection and your hand gestures without having to have the camera in your glasses as well. Calibrating it would probably be too inflexible, but just having your fingers show up as cursors on the projection in your glasses seems reasonable.
But without the need for BIG RAT.
the said device is awesome at mixing technologies and information and producing astonishing amount of deductive / relevant information in a user-friendly interface.
that's the "Sixth Sense" / intuition part.
Not a 6th sense organ in the biological sense.
The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source.
Cut the crap. The demo is nice and couldn't help but make me smile, but what is there to commercialise? This is just the same type of novelty crap you get to see all the time these days, wearable crap, augmented reality, tangible interfaces and other paper interfaces.
You see new stuff like that everyday, from a dude making a techno beat by moving beer bottle caps around on a sheet of paper, some other dude cross fading recordings by driving around a desert area using GPS data, all these things are nice and make up for entertaining videos to post on blogs.
But these thing have a major flaw: they don't answer to any need, they don't create any need, they don't solve any problem, and they're in no way anything like basic research. They're only novel crap done by bored geeks who want to do something 'cool' (and "look cool like Tom Cruise") with their excess of free time and their love for techy crap. That's why none of these things could be commercialised. You can dick around all you want with electronics and webcams with object recognition/movement detection, but you can't sell what you do because no one needs it.
You just got troll'd!
Please.
Bill Gates dropped money on MIT. Then MIT shutdown its media lab and fired everyone. Then MIT hired a bunch of posers and Microsoft cocksuckers to say that they are MIT media lab.
Where is the link to the project page showing he is not one of those? Where is the link to the project page talking about the languages, libraries and systems he used? Oh. That's right. There aren't any.
The media lab today has as much resemblance to the old media lab as the new napster has to the old napster.
the said device is awesome at mixing technologies and information and producing astonishing amount of deductive / relevant information in a user-friendly interface.
mixing technologies and information with computers - patent pending ;-)