TED Talks: Moonsail review #1
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds and the website TED.com is devoted to presenting videos of these riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world. While it is a wonderful resource, the main problem is that there are so many inspiring videos that it can sometimes be overwhelming. This is the first of a series of TED Talk reviews here at Moonsail Design where I will try and identify the best of the best for your easy edification.
1. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry—Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech.
Speaker Pattie Maes is an Associate Professor of Media, Arts and Sciences at MIT’s Media Lab (which is a department within the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and runs a research group at the Media Lab called the Fluid Interfaces Group. The newly founded group was established to rethink the ways in which humans and computers interact.
Pranav Mistry is a second year graduate student at the Media Lab and serves as Pattie’s video assistant, and as she thanks him at the end of the talk, she explains he’s the main driving force behind the sixth sense device. According to his bio, “Pranav’s research interests include intelligent interactive systems, tangible interactions, social computing, collective intelligence and robotics. He got his master and bachelor degree from IIT Bombay, India, and has the background in Computer Science and Design.”
Pattie introduces the sixth sense wearable device by wearing one round her neck and explains that it’s been cobbled together from easily sourced tech that totals $350. It combines a camera, projector and mirror. You also need to wear colour markers on your fingers for that full “Minority Report” effect. All I can say is, I want one. It doesn’t really do anything much different to certain applications on my iPhone, but it’s the interface and projected accessibility that really excites me.
In the demonstration, Pranav wears the device and demonstrates how the coloured markers on his fingers are seen and interpreted by the device in different ways, depending on which application was running. He demonstrates navigating a map projected into a wall using hand gestures, or making the classic “picture frame” gesture takes a picture, he can draw a watch onto his wrist or scan an airline ticket to see if the flight is on time. My favourite application projects onto people or products internet scan results, such as book reviews, or tag clouds.
This is an inspiring presentation and every time I’ve watched it with my students they are moved to applause at the end of it. If you are new to the idea of TED, this is a great introduction and if you’re excited by new “personal” technologies, such as the iPhone, then you will find this mesmerising.
Moonsail rating: 10 full moons.
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I love this talk. So exciting!