In his November 2009 TEDIndia talk, Pranav shares his belief that this technology has the potential to reclaim our humanity. SixthSense will steer us from becoming Computers interacting with Computers to humans interacting with the digital world as we would the real world.
SixthSense was first brought to the global stage in March at TED in March 2009 by Pranav's professor, Pattie Maes. Comparing that talk with Pranav's November talk, you see that this is not another grad student project destined to sit on the shelf after the inventor graduates - the catalog of use cases has clearly expanded in past seven months. One use case that Pattie alludes to, but is missing from Pranav's more recent talk, is the potential to evaluate the environmental impact of retail goods while you're shopping. This use case is at the heart of what we want to enable at downstream.org. Today by the use of barcode, and tomorrow, thanks to SixthSense, visual object detection/recognition.
The future for SixthSense is made more exciting by Pranav's plans to opensource the technology. He cites his desire to bring it to the masses, rather than keep it cloistered in the research domain, as motivation to open this up. Let's hope he is successful in those plans. Choice of license may be one of the most important decisions he makes in the evolution of SixthSense. With so many obvious and wide ranging improvements it would be a shame to see the potential get locked up in a commercial fork that dominates the device options and turns it into nothing more than an ad platform.
More background on SixthSense and Pranav Mistry:
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