Demo of a New "Sixth Sense" Technology 187
TEDChris writes "Here's an intriguing attempt at a versatile new tech device that tries to augment the wearer's five senses. It comes out of Patty Maes's group at the MIT Media Lab. By combining a computerized personal projector with a camera and linking both to the Net, a host of surprising new applications becomes possible. This 8-minute demo created a lot of buzz at TED last month and was posted online today. Would love to know what the Slashdot community makes of it."
Sixth Sense (Score:4, Funny)
Turns out that the character played by Bruce Willis was shot dead at the beginning of the movie.
Warning: the preceding was a spoiler.
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Insensitive clod, some of us like that movie!
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Re:Sixth Sense (Score:4, Informative)
The only issue i have is that there is actually already more than five senses in the human body.
In addition to:
- Sight
- Hearing
- Taste
- Smell
- Touch
There is:
- Balance and acceleration
- Temperature
- Kinesthetic sense (the part of the brain that tells the position of various parts of our limbs. Previously this was thought to be related to touch, but its been found in weightlessness, our brains can still "sense" the position of our limbs.)
- Pain (different to touch, as pain can exist without touch.
There are also other senses used for respiratory, etc.
Don't forget the noise generator (Score:3, Interesting)
Also there's the noise generator, also known as the creative mind. If you count senses as basically a signal generator (IE: eyes generate a signal based on the light levels, ears generate a signal, etc.) then the creative mind is definitely one as well. Too many people think of the senses as the sense itself plus the filtering system of the brain (and the recording and cataloging sections as well). Looking at them as a package prevents one from seeing that the filtering, recording and cataloging systems
Re:Sixth Sense (Score:5, Funny)
Dr. Manhattan killed Rosebud? That was Charles Foster Kane's favorite sled!!
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One possible application (Score:5, Funny)
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Wasn't there a Sony camcorder over a decade ago that could do this?
ISTR that it was recalled due to its "night vision" mode turning into more like "x-ray vision", except stopping at just under the clothe
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[citation needed]
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Linked to from the references section of this wikipedia article:
Infrared photography [wikipedia.org]
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All you need for this feature is a simple IR camera.
It's easy to do - just remove IR filter (looks like transparent plastic film) from any cheap digital camera and add visible light filter (red plastic film).
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Yup, suprisingly many fabrics are IR transparent/translucent.
A fun thing to do is get a black shirt that is grey under IR and write messages on it in black or blue marker. Freaks out security, but looks almost normal to the mook asking you to take off your shoes.
Not so much fun at casinos, though.
spidy sense! (Score:4, Funny)
Now all we need are web casters, ultra-sticky material for the hands and feet, and someone to beat Tobby MacGuire with a bar of soap in a sock if he comes anywhere near it.
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At will? And without touching by your (or anyone's) hands?
I would hate to see what your laundry looks like...
I already have more than five senses (Score:5, Funny)
I, as a typical human, have plenty more than five senses. I would have hoped that people's understanding of their own body would have continued past grade-school.
But in any event, I welcome yet another sense beyond my current twenty-something.
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Re:I already have more than five senses (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fortunately, he is not the only "person" [unnecessaryquotes.com] to misunderstand quotes
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Did you watch the video? There is definitely something to see here.
I expected to have a foodarackacycle and a rosie robot by now, at least a flying car. But this will do for now.
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Re:I already have more than five senses (Score:4, Funny)
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She said that the components cost about $350 as is.
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Sure.. just like the "components" of my server costs only $5,000. Then there's the $30k database license sitting on it. And the 2A of power it draws, and the $1k/month internet connection.. and my salary.. etc. Her hardware cost reference is to promote the "why don't we have this now?" reaction.
Anyone else notice the instances of him using the device (bookstore, grovery store) were conspicuously dimly lit? Not knocking what is certainly a clever packaging of components in an experimental doodad.. but wo
Re:I already have more than five senses (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, just like that except you aren't holding a PDA in your hands, it's projecting on to surfaces that you are looking at.
Again, I predict that you didn't watch the video. They built it with "off the shelf" parts for $350.
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They built it with "off the shelf" parts for $350.
Now add in manufacturing labor and maintenance, R&D costs, quality control, profit and marketing. A lot more than component cost goes into making a device. I would estimate with bulk orders, you could get the component cost down to $275-$300. That's not bad. Now you'll need to double it or probably more. Pretty soon it costs as much as a laptop and the iPhone becomes cheaper.
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Yeah the iPhone recognizes whatever object/person you put in front of it and displays information about it directly on it. I must have missed that one in the app store.
Don't let my boss see it.. (Score:2)
Darn !
There goes my desk, phone, computer. 8)
Empty cubicles, guys ?
I, for one, welcome the next topic on "the best/cheapest 15%gray paint/cover you can slap on the cubicle" (tm)
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Exactly. Now the cyborg implant of a magnet in the middle finger of the left hand- that at least does SOMETHING NEW.
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Re:I already have more than five senses (Score:5, Informative)
I, as a typical human, have plenty more than five senses. I would have hoped that people's understanding of their own body would have continued past grade-school.
Yup. This is a pet-peeve of mine, too. Humans have between 9-16 senses [wikipedia.org] (or more), depending on how you want to count/divide them. The "5 senses" idea dates back to Aristotle... and we've learned quite a bit about the world and the human body since then. Frankly it's ridiculous that even in grade school children are told that humans have 5 senses: it's patently false. And it's quite easy to demonstrate otherwise (e.g. ask a person if they can sense which way is down).
It bugs me to no end that these kinds of basic science mistakes are repeated ad nauseum.
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It goes down great with the kids, though the teachers I know, hate it.
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Re:I already have more than five senses (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on who you ask...
I would say we have only 4 senses: chemical, light, pressure and temperature... but part of my job is to work on electrical analogues of sense and often this boils down to the most basic properties. For example, telling which way is down is just an application of a pressure sensor, even though it's nothing like a sense of "touch".
Of course, I understand completely that a neurologist is going to have a different opinion, which is correct in its own way, and probably more similar to how a computer scientist would think of things.
But, yeah, the 5 senses thing is pretty dumb.
Re:I already have more than five senses (Score:5, Insightful)
I would say we have only 4 senses
And I would say you're too smart for your own good. A sense is an aspect of the physical world you can detect, it's *not* the type of physical phenomena being utilized in the sense. Otherwise, all senses are just chemical (or electro-chemical, if you want).
The sense of up and down is distinct from the sense of rough or smooth, even though both use pressure, just like a radio antenna and a roll of photographic film are distinct even though they both measure electromagnetism.
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So... the sense of light intensity different from frequency? Do we have a sense of wind? Insects detect chemicals with antenna which work much differently than animal noses, does that mean they don't really "smell"? You can go crazy with the number of ways we interact with the world, or you can try to generalize them. I find it more convenient to generalize, but I understand the biological reasons for enumerating slight differences in senses.
Also, I'm not just being clever. I didn't come up with those
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I find this absurd situation to be quite
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We talk of "depth perception" in
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If you tell a five-year-old about his sense of vision, she won't understand either -- unless you said the word "vision" before.
"Equilibrium" is not a difficult word. You simply have to teach it -- five-year-olds lack two very important skills, they aren't psychic, and they don't tend to initiate cognitive learning.
But hey, as an adult, the number of times I talk to clients or people and have to say "emplain it to me as though I'm six" is very large. A lot of people like to say things, having no idea what
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Very well put. I do have one question though...
How old is your daughter?
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I haven't a daughter of my own. If I did, I'd win the award for fighting the most battles for home schooling. I continue to watch people give-up on teaching things before they've even started. And I've watched people try to teach things they themselves don't understand.
I'm now approached to teach parents about how to teach their children about computers. They used to ask about how to secure adult content from their children. It took a lot of effort to explain to them that doing so is counter-productive
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Ah, the markers and the cisco thing. High-school took three years of chemistry, always asking "what's the definition of an acid and a base". It changed every three months. In the second year, I caught-on, and I read to the end of the next text book, and gave the actual correct answer one year early -- and failed the test.
You can lead me through the history of understanding all you like, and you can teach me simplistic views, but you've got to tell me that they are simplistic, and don't think for one mome
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the characteristic or attribute of one who ignores otherwise readily accessible knowledge. From the root verb to ignore. Differs from unknowledgable by taking on an active quality.
Thus, children are typically not ignorant, having lacked the opportunity to learn a particular issue. Similarly, an adult never having had the opportunity to go to pilot an aircraft is not ignorant of those skills. Contrast that with an experienced co-pilot never having learned any piloting skills.
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"Sixth sense" is a metaphorical, idiomatic phrase. I would've thought that people's understanding of basic English would have continued past grade-school.
Re:I already have more than five senses (Score:5, Informative)
1 & 2. Brightness and Color
3. Hearing
4. Pressure
5. Pain
6. Temperature
7. Smell
8-13. The different Taste Receptors
14. Balance/acceleration
15. Proprioception - Knowing where your body parts are. If you don't believe this is a sense check out the Pinocchio Illusion
16. Vasodilation in the skin (blushing)
17. Sensing a full bladder/bowels
18. Intestinal discomfort (not actually pressure nerves, that's just how your body perceives them)
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8-13. The different Taste Receptors
Now you're just being picky. Why not separate the cone cells into S,M and L, or split the sense of smell down into the thousands of distinct odours we can detect?
Besides, you're missing the point. The 5 senses description is part of the lies-to-children approach to teaching. You teach the basics by giving them a simplification or outright falsehood that conveys the meaning well enough - and that lie is good enough for that purpose, even for an adult layman.
Take physics, wi
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Not only, "whats that about?" but
don't forget fashion sense (Score:2)
Once you go beyond the mechanics physical receptor to what interpretations we are gathering about the world, suddenly we have a great many senses.
We have a great many senses focused around identifying peer groups and mood states of other humans. The cuteness-sense of seeing a baby animal is as much a digestion of brightness and color to give an important data point as pressure senses lead to giving us a perception of balance/acceleration.
One of the things we humans are great at is extending our sense of se
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7. balance
8. acceleration
9. proprioception
10. temperature
Just to get you started...
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Care to name your other twenty something senses?
PS: there should be no hyphen between "grade" and "school". Dodn't you learn that in grade school?
Nope I dodn't learn that in grade school
Re:I already have more than five senses (Score:5, Informative)
Pain, proprioception, thermoception, orientation, direction, acceleration, balance, . . .
Ever seen a cop perform a field-sobriety test? You know, before breathalizers? It specifically tests balance and proprioception -- stand on one leg, eyes closed, and touch your nose. The only way it tests any of your five is because you need to hear the cop speak the directions.
Build a robot, or design any physical machine, and see how many "sensors" you need before it can do anything. Your laser printer has a dozen sensors just to align the paper!
In my world, possibly the same as yours, "grade-school" is indeed hyphenated; in part because it is a unified term. In "grade school", "grade" is an adjective where "school" is a noun. In such syntax, "grade" modifies "school". I was not referring to a school on a hill, or to school which teaches about grading. Now, I was talking about a school which is gradual, and hence "grade school" would have worked, I was not referring to the entire academic system in which education is taught gradually. I was referring to the subset of years consisting of grades 1 through 6(ish), commonly coined "grade-school".
Similarly, I could have used "elementary-school", however "elementary school" would have been a school that teaches the periodic table, or the basic elements of some other industry.
See, "adjective noun" is a general form of English, where each word is considered according to its individual definition. "adjective-noun" is a specific form of English, where the compound-word (or "compounded word", because "compound" is a noun, and "compounded" is the adjective here) is considered according to a non-Englist lexicon, often industry-specific jargon.
They taught me your way in grade-school, when they told me that I was in grade school. That's my point. My education continued beyond grade-school where I learned that I had not only attended grade school but I had also attended grade-school; and I learned the important distinction.
But I'll ask you the same question I ask of people who argue "whom" versus "who". "How many times have you said the word 'whom' in the last year?" Many of them realize that they've never used it, and that's when they realize that they must be making some mistake. So in your case, when was the last time you used a hyphen? If you answer is unreasonable, then clearly you aren't utilizing the entire English language properly.
A lot of people have been dropping hyphens over the last sixty years -- twice my life-time. But hey, people say "there's five of them over there" because they don't seem to realize how ignorant and hick-town it sounds when expanded to "there is five . . .".
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I'd like to see a source on those hyphenation rules, if possible. I've taught English before, and although hyphenation rules are often rather vague, I've never heard of this particular distinction, and Wikipedia and the dictionary seem to disagree with you.
The distinction you're making doesn't really seem consistent, either. Aren't I learning "elementary knowledge" in elementary school? And can't "grade school" be distinguished as the type of school in which students are identified by numbered "grades"? (In
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Everyone's entitled to an opinion as to how fast we should collectively permit our language to (d)ev
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"Dictionaries" these days showcase common usage, not actual meaning. They politically add things like "mentee" and "ain't".
"grammar school" ain't a compound word, you haven't compounded it. And Google is hardly a worthy source for language definition -- as opposed to language usage.
"high school" is a great example. Try to craft a sentence where that can be understood without ambiguity.
"I went to a high school". Was it an up-hill battle every morning?
You can ditch the rules all you want, and we can all a
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Yeah, I've noticed that too, but I figure that here, I'm typing a mile-a-minute, and really not slowing down for accuracy.
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Welcome to social discourse. It's called cross-association -- and that's a well-accepted measure of intelligence.
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That would be my mind. But read your local newspaper, listen to your prime-time sitcoms, even watch the news. You'll be HORRIFIED at how many people in your given day say "there's [many things]. . ."
But hey, just start with "anyway" and "manyways", and cut out "anyways" which makes no sense.
Oh, and "icecream" doesn't exist. Neither does "ice cream". "ice-cream" does. and it used to be "iced cream". Are you surprised that when you take milk, turn it into cream, and make it really cold, that it's iced c
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So it's upsetting that public knowledge stops at a mere five.
I guess (Score:3, Informative)
Overlay on my glass instead... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope I can get the information overlay'ed on my glass instead of projecting out. First it should get better contrast, second I don't need to display what I am looking to the public.
Put the calibration aside, I would need to start wearing glass...Or should we get the video overlay signal injected into the brain?
Re:Overlay on my glass instead... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that was my reaction. It's one thing if all the information being displayed would be a standard default, but as soon as you customize what data to show you, you're already displaying private information about yourself whenever using this. It'd be much better if it was displayed in a format that was private, that only you could see.
Beyond that, if it's something mounted in your glasses, it seems like it opens the potential (perhaps) to track eye movement and therefore guess at what you're looking at. That might open the door to have it make more intelligent guesses as to what kind of information you're looking for, instead of just displaying information about whatever happens to be in front of you.
But I gather from the video that this was all just supposed to be a starting point or proof of concept rather than an actual product. Maybe given an investment, building it into glasses would be more feasible.
Wearable Display? (Score:2, Interesting)
The use of a retinal display could complement this thing nicely... but since microvision have all and every patent on this... and only create stuff for military purpose, we won't see anything like this soon...
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On the plus side, the basic patents have less than 10 years to go.
Spook Country (Score:2)
This idea was featured in Spook Country by William Gibson.
You would think that (Score:2, Funny)
with all that technology the girl at the end would have a calculator watch.
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Some of this is reminiscent (Score:2)
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Augmented senses: SID (Score:3, Informative)
I already know how to augment a person's senses: it's called SID (Sensory Integration Disorder). Anyone with SID is automatically the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Doesn't require any awkward paraphernalia, either, just a few rearranged genes! You probably already know one of these SID people, like the guy who screams at the neighborhood kids to stop that infernal racket!
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"So you mean that mutants with super hearing and x-ray vision are walking among us now? ZOMG! Call Nathan Petrelli and round 'em up!"
"Super hearing" happens (Score:3, Interesting)
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Since I have SID, I already have super hearing, thanks, but most of the time I wish I *didn't* have it. It's a life-altering distraction that can't be turned-off. That might be one good thing to say for a tech alternative: it will of course have the on-off switch that I wish I had.
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The only good thing I see about it (Score:2)
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
Solution in search of a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Surprising? (Score:3, Informative)
"a host of surprising new applications becomes possible"
Surprising? New?
No. Please read some Vernor Vinge. To stay on topic, I recommend "Fast Times at Fairmont High", which covers the concept of augmented reality quite well. Someone wake me when technology catches up to that.
That said, I think it's wonderful that someone is working on it.
A.
Vernor Vinge is the man (Score:2)
Vernor Vinge invented cyberspace (although I don't think he coined the term) in True Names.
If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. Read True Names to get a notion of the profound visionary Vernor Vinge is. (Remember it was published in 1981).
Then read Rainbows End with your newfound respect for Vinge's powers of prognostication, and recognize that you're seeing into the near future.
(This post is a blatant copy of an old post of mine.)
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I've seen a couple comments when browsing reviews on Amazon stating that the year was way out of the realm of possibility.
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That's great - I wanted to do almost exactly the app he's doing with the "treasure hunt" for a mobile platform.
The only difference was that I wanted to make it more of a large scale thing, and use gps to get you close. I didn't think about using features to guide you once you get close... I was going to use large scale features for which the error in gps coordinates wouldn't be an issue. The thing that prevented me from doing the app is that I would need a digital compass in the phone to be able to tell
It should be possible with high-end pohnes (Score:2)
Actually they do. There are several working implementation of dense feature detectors on the smartphone, including SIFT [wikipedia.org], FAST [cam.ac.uk] and SURF [wikipedia.org], and some of them are capable of doing planar image registration(like Daniel Wagner "markerless" tracker [youtube.com]. It's using image as fiduciary [wikipedia.org]). The real difficulty is getting 3d structure form motion [wikipedia.org] on the mobile, but that could be possible too soon. My opinion is tat 500+Mhz smartphone with floating poin
Someone Please Tell Me (Score:3, Insightful)
Just what really revolutionary devices have been developed and put into common use by MIT Media Lab? I see a lot of hype from them, and it's getting less and less realistic and more obviously pie-in-the-sky. Science in the popular media only requires this condition and that's where Media Lab seems to live now. Real applications require more. What concretely have they done, previously and lately?
If they're stuck in theory mode, so be it. But then they should present their theories as such, not as super duper gaming gizmos on the verge of revolutionizing everyday life.
I'm still waiting for my jeans with the embedded keyboard they "demo'd" a decade or more ago.
Where are the intention gestures? (Score:2, Interesting)
Where is the free software project? (Score:2)
We only have five senses? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm ...
Taste, smell, vision, hearing, touch, balance, temperature, spatial.
I suspect I'm leaving several more out, but which ones am I supposed to ditch?
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Re:How the Hell is this a sense, or even useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of technology is the combination of existing pieces. What makes it useful is how the pieces are combined. Are search engines useful for that matter - they're essentially queries running on databases right?
Besides, it's a demo of a work in progress. You could have come up with this - but did you? Did you even think about it and envision it as completely as it was presented in the video, let alone implement it?
This is a work of genius. Please do not belittle it.
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yeah, but try typing on your laptop with your fingers just inches away from a hard drive...
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Contrary to popular belief, 'sense' is not a biologically meaningful unit. Arguing about the number of senses is like arguing about the number of races. It's meaningless.