The MIT Media Lab’s Pranav Mistry recounted the history of his SixthSense project at TED India this week. SixthSense started when Mistry took the rollers out of two computer mice (mouses?), attached some pulleys, and made a glove-like hand-gesture interface. Moving through SixthSense’s evolution, Mistry talks about some Internet-synced sticky notes, pens that draw in three dimensions, Google maps that interact with physical objects, and other things that, if said by anyone else, would just be crazy talk.
From there, he explains how he inverted the process, in an effort to “paint the physical world with that digital information.” He started with a projector mounted on his bike helmet that would project pixels onto the physical world. He added a camera and the system eventually shrank down to the pendant we recognize as the current incarnation of SixthSense.
In the video, Mistry demonstrates the system by casually doing things that shouldn’t make any sense: Digitally painting on a physical wall, taking a photo of the Boston skyline by framing it with his index fingers and thumbs, dialing a phone number on numbers projected on his palm, watching video of President Obama’s MIT speech on a print newspaper; reading a tag cloud — “comedian,” “geek,” etc. — that appears on comedian/blogger Baratunde Thurston’s shirt when Mistry meets him; playing a video game on a piece of paper; and copying text and charts from the regular kind of paper and pasting them to his crazy, digital paper, just by picking it up and moving it.
The computer system, which you wear around your neck, projects information on the world around you, which you can then manipulate with your hands. Pretty soon, you may be able to build your own for about $350. Mistry told a TED India panel this week he didn’t want to subject SixthSense to corporate whims.
After the jump, watch Fluid Interface Group director Patti Maes present the technology to the TED conference in March. (more…)
Technology Review takes a look at Charlestown-based Cogito Health, who has developed software to determine whether people are depressed or not based on an analysis of their voices.
The MIT Media Lab spinout is based on the research of Sandy Pentland.
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have developed a robot — the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) — to offer “the same kind of guidance as an informed and friendly companion.”
The system features an expressive robotic head, pictured above, that would protrude from the dashboard. Nothing creepy there. Media Lab researcher Cynthia Breazeal, Carlo Ratti, and Assaf Biderman are working with the Media Lab’s SENSEable City Lab and automaker Audi on the product.
The robot would analyze your driving patterns, your route, traffic, the weather and other information to guide you. It would also interact with you via expressions, like a smile or the Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph-we’re-going-to-die exclamation point.
Local designer Lauren McCarthy, ex- of MIT’s Media Lab, CSAIL, and Visual Arts Program, developed a hat that detects whether or not you are smiling, and if not, it stabs you in the back of the head: The Happiness Hat.
McCarthy’s web site says the hat is the first in a series of “tools for improved social interacting.” She further explains:
An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. The device runs on Arduino.
For my dollar, when I see someone walking down the street with a constant smile on their face, I think “deranged,” not “happy.” But then again, that might be exactly why I need a Happiness Hat.
Harvard Medical School has developed a H1N1-tracking iPhone app. The app is a project of HMS Mobile, which sounds like a British Navy ship, but says it’s a Harvard Medical group dedicated to helping people deal with day-to-day health emergencies.
Also — that’ll be two bucks. Just around the corner, those anti-capitalist hippies at Children’s Hospital, working with the MIT Media Lab, released their own, free H1N1 tracking app last month.
That’s two H1N1 apps sprouting from about one city block — If things keep up like this, pretty soon you should be able to use your mobile phone to track H1N1 germs chasing you down the street in real-time, or see the normally invisible H1N1 crawling over people’s faces in an augmented reality app, exposing them as the feverish, congested zombies they are.
Tonight is Game 1 of the Red Sox’ five-game divisional series against the Angels, which creates two near-certainties: Another Sox/Yankees ALCS; and “worker productivity” becoming an oxymoron at offices throughout New England tomorrow. This thing doesn’t start till 9:37 p.m., for Hendu’s sake, and postseason baseball tends to go well with alcohol.
But what baseball taketh away, it can also giveth, or whatever. The sport has inspired some nifty innovations in analytics, robotics and … let’s call it life sciences.
MIT News Office photo
• In spring training, the Sox, who even give their IT guy World Series rings, supplemented hitting coach Dave Magadan with the MIT Media Lab, naturally. For the last few years, researchers from the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group, has been strapping sensors to minor leagers while they’re batting at the Sox camp at Fort Myers. The info from accelerometers and gyroscopes could provide insight on differences in swing mechanics during a hot streak or a slump.
• Using an arm developed at MIT, University of Tokyo researchers have developed baseball-playing robots that could make the Fall Classic either more interesting, or entirely pointless, to watch. Think of all the time and money the Sox would save on scouting, not to mention free agency. And J.D. Drew would presumably be injured far less often if he were a robot. (more…)
Since our beloved and normally only sporadically dangerous T has decided to be more reliablyandconsistentlyterrifying, and since everybody deciding to drive to work en masse would end life in Greater Boston as we know it, what are your alternatives? Even better, what are your science-fiction-y alternatives that won’t really be available any time soon? MHT Blog is here to help.
Terrafugia's Transition
Let’s start with the outrageously impractical: If you’ve got about $150,000 burning a hole in your pocket — and these days, who doesn’t? — you could buy a flying car. But that would really just amount to driving, since Terrafugia insists its Transition is a “roadable aircraft” — you drive to the airport and fly to LaGuardia, you don’t just take off while stuck in traffic on 128.
Rail-Pod
You absolutely cannot use automated, personal train cars to get to work — but it would be cool if you could. Rail-Pod, started by four UMass Amherst alumni, wants to build feeder lines to the existing fire-and-crash-prone train lines on unused tracks — but even if they accomplish their goals, that’s a ways off. (more…)
Intuitive Automata has posted video of its Autom weight-loss coach robot. The company is an MIT Media Lab spinout making robots for the health care industry.
Intuitive Automata CEO Cory Kidd has turned up in MHT before, talking about the then-unnamed Autom and robotics in general. The company has since moved to Hong Kong.
Kidd worked in the Media Lab’s Personal Robotics Group, also home to Nexi, the emotion-mimicking robot. Autom itself has slimmed down a bit since its Media Lab days — it’s also lost the molded plastic hair and added a mouth. After the jump, watch video of Kidd presenting an earlier version of the robot.
CNNMoney talks to Harmonix founders Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos about starting the company:
ALEX: As we were finishing grad school at lab, we were doing work in an area so weird that I figured no one would actually pay me to do it. Getting a job didn’t seem like an option. Starting a company was the only avenue at my disposal to continue to do the type of work that I wanted to do.
And about developing its latest product, The Beatles: Rock Band:
ALEX: Yoko was sitting on the couch pointing out that no, she wanted John’s eyes to move that way…
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