Working at Chaordix has provided me with plenty of opportunity to do cool things. One of those things is organizing TEDxYYC (an independently organized TEDx event). As part of the event, the volunteer team has promised to highlight a different TEDtalk every day. I made everyone in the office watch this one yesterday and we were all impressed by Pranav Mistry. His demonstration of sixthsense technology includes some mind blowing stuff, like dialing a call in the palm of your hand, taking a photo by using your fingers to frame it and move seamlessly between paper and computer.
Listen to him talk at TED about what he’d like to do with the technology (take it open source) how it happened and how much the prototype costs to build (you too can build this for the low, low price of around $350!). Check out more of Pranav Mistry’s work on his website.
This interesting video merges technologies that have been around for a while such as heads up computing devices, interactive tables and smart boards, interactive video projection, object recognition and visual data analysis. The fact that all of this is presented in a simplified manner speaks well for Pranav Mistry who uses his prototypes to describe how this merging of technologies can address several business and human needs. By doing so, he is increasing awareness and promoting the generation of ideas for new practical applications intended to benefit people. This approach can be helpful in raising capital to support further research and eventually lead to selected product production. The new product ideas that will emerge from this process will need a means whereby the potential users of such technologies can help identify, describe, justify, organize, prioritize and select the direction that future development should take in order to bring these new products to the people that will benefit from it the most.