First African demo of Sixth Sense Technology

Pranav Mistry, an MIT Student and TED speaker showcased Africa’s first live demo of Sixth Sense Technology at the 12th annual Internetix conference, held at The Forum, in Bryanston, South Africa.

Basically, Sixth Sense is a mini-projector coupled with a camera and a cellphone—which acts as the computer and your connection to the Cloud, all the information stored on the web. Sixth Sense can also obey hand gestures, like in the infamous movie Minority Report.

Internetix, themed “The Pulse of Commerce” is an Internet Solutions (IS) event that attracts global ICT industry leaders to discuss the latest and future technology trends. Internetix provides an opportunity for the IS community to network and collaborate with global ICT companies.

Mistry spoke to ITNewsAfrica regarding his passion for technology, digital and people.

Mistry’s interest in 6th Sense Technology stems from his curiosity about human and machine interaction. He believes there might be better ways of interacting with machines than what we’re currently experiencing.

Here’s video clip of Pravan showcasing Sixth Sense at a TED conference in India:

Understanding Sixth Sense Technology

The sixth sense device consists of two major components – a camera and a projector.

“The camera acts like a digital eye, whatever you see, the device can also see it. “

“The projector acts like an output device that projects the information back to the real world.
Sixth sense is a whole philosophy of how the pixels can be free. There’s a whole lot of projects that are happening along that line.
“Our world consists of a digital and physical world.”

“With sixth sense I’m trying to bridge this gap. I’m trying to make this world seamless and one.
Sixth sense allows an individual to take a photo using physical gestures. With sixth sense, the dynamic data comes to the real world,” says Mistry.

Mistry’s career highlight is his creation of an invisible computer mouse. “The important element is not the hardware but our gestures and knowledge of how to use a computer mouse.”

Africa’s Sixth Sense Live Demo

Mistry dismantled his PC mouse and created a new hand g
love device. He demonstrated how it can be used to retrieve and manipulate information in a virtual world.

“Another project I’m working on is Sparsh, a new way of transferring data between digital devices,” says Mistry.

“Whatever content or whatever things you touch on your smarphone or an iPad it conceptually gets copied on the individual’s body and you can pass it and carry the data with you and paste it back to any digital device, smartphone, mobile or PC.

Bontle Moeng