The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Pranav Mistry
Why Hacker News recommends it
Mostly cited as the origin of ideas later commercialized by products like Humane's projector, and sometimes as a demo that never took off.
What it is
Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2016 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends prakhar897 · 2021-08 · on “Ask HN: What are some of the best non-technical talks of all time?”
Here's mine: 1. Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams [LINK] 2. Strange answers to the psychopath test | Jon Ronson [LINK] 3. The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Pranav Mistry [this video] 4. Steve Jobs MIT Class: What he learnt after he was fired from Apple? [LINK] 5. Eric Liu: Why ordinary people need to understand power [LINK] 6. Peter Lynch 1994 Lecture [LINK]
Cites dagmx · 2023-04 · on “Video of Humane’s Wearable AI Projector in Action”
After all the hype, it seems almost anti-climactic that the demo is so similar to what Pranav Mistry showed with SixthSense in 2009 [LINK] [this video] Granted, over a decade later a lot of the tech is in place to do this at a higher fidelity. But the same core issues remain: privacy. People don’t want what they’re up to, to be projected for everyone to see at all times, whether that’s visual or audio. Yes, people can look over our shoulders today to see our phones, but it’s much smaller, and therefore harder to snoop on. the same goes for audio, I don’t want to blast my audio out so everyone can hear either. Imho this will be an interesting novelty stepping stone on the way to more practical wav
Cites fidotron · 2023-10 · on “Humane, a startup full of ex-iPhone talent, trying to make phones obsolete”
This looks like an attempt to commercialise the ideas in [this video] Projectors have a killer problem which is they aren't very bright, and those that are bright enough to be useful are dangerous to everyone nearby.
Critical altrego99 · 2016-03 · on “Microsoft demos 'holoportation' 3D presence tech with HoloLens”
Here is something that never took off. And never will despite the popularity of this video. [this video] The difference? Selfie stick does exactly what it says it does and isn't more awkward, lowres, latency prone or difficult to use than a normal person would expect.