MIT’s Media Lab have unveiled their take on ‘Minority Report’ style technology in the form of ‘SixthSense’. Notwithstanding the mixed film references, the wearable technology is pretty clever: allowing the user to merge the ‘real world’ with the ‘digital world’ by projecting interactive content onto the surface of virtually any object.

SixthSense is essentially hybrid of a camera, projector and a mobile phone. The camera recognises objects around the user (and the gestures that the user makes to interact with the applications), the projector overlays the digital content onto the objects’ surfaces, and the mobile phone acts as the CPU and the connection to the Web.

The combination of these technologies and the MIT-developed software gives users the ability to access and interact with web-based applications virtually anywhere – with the added benefit that the content of the applications can be automatically linked to the specific objects they are being projected onto.

Cool stuff indeed…

That’s a fairly simplistic explanation though. There’s a more comprehensive video demonstration of it here:

Admittedly, the current prototype looks a bit clunky – making its users look like they got lost somewhere on an interactive museum tour – but I think the prospect of this low cost technology (and the new media space it essentially creates) is very interesting for brands.

There are clearly thousands of potential applications, but suggestions for its commercial use have included:

• Displaying the details and reasons for flight delays on airline boarding passes. 
• Reviews of books in bookstores. 
• Bringing gaming into the real world – for example by allowing people to have a virtual tennis lesson on a real tennis court.  (Ref: BBC)
• Giving tourists a virtual museum tour by augmenting the real world sites with information and content (I think AMEX would be well-placed to deliver this type of content, for example). (Ref: Softpedia)

Some of these ideas are included in the youtube video clip of the TED presentation, above.

My own initial thoughts on potential commercial uses include:

• Delivering targeted promotions and activation incentives at point of sale (e.g. an interactive label on a wine bottle, or a virtual/real world game on the back of a box of cereal etc).
• Social networking zones in pubs and clubs – allowing users to instantly share their experiences and status stories, as well as entertain friends with any self-generated content (video clips, photos etc).
• Displaying music videos and preview trailers on CDs and DVDs, or on other otherwise ‘static’ promotional materials.
• Overlaying directions to gates in airport terminals, with a real-time countdown in distance and ‘minutes to the gate’.

The technology is clearly in the early stages of development and there will be some way to go before it is a truly commercially-viable and ‘consumer-friendly’ system, but it certainly does seem to present an exciting prospect for how we might interact with the world around us in the future.

However, I do wonder how easy it will be to control unsolicited content from being projected in public places, and indeed whether people will generally find the concept of people freely projecting personal content on the spaces around us intrusive. It could quite possibly replace inconsiderate mobile phone use as one of modern life’s big irritations. Regardless, this is the sort of technological development that gets you thinking about the possibilites…

One of the MIT development team explained “It is very much a work in progress. Maybe in ten years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant.”

Hmmm, I think I’ll pass on that one, myself.