Sixth Sense Technology

What is Sixth Sense Technology?

Sixth Sense Technology integrates digital information into the physical world and its objects, making the entire world your computer. It can turn any surface into a touch-screen for computing, controlled by simple hand gestures. It is not a technology which is aimed at changing human habits but causing computers and other machines to adapt to human needs. It also supports multi user and multi touch provisions. Sixth Sense device is a mini-projector coupled with a camera and a cell phone-which acts as the computer and your connection to the Cloud, all the information stored on the web. The current prototype costs around $350. The Sixth Sense prototype is used to implement several applications that have shown the usefulness, viability and flexibility of the system

Introduction of Sixth Sense Technology

'Sixth Sense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information the hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. The Sixth Sense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror, coloured marker and a camera. The camera, mirror and projector is connected wirelessly to a blue tooth smart phone device that can easily fit into the user's pocket, Software then processes the data that is collected by the capturing device and produces analysis. The software that is used in sixth sense device is open source type.

The Sixth Sense prototype contains a number of demonstration applications.

• The map application lets the user navigate a map displayed on a nearby surface using hand gestures to zoom and pan
• The drawing application lets the user draw on any surface by tracking the fingertip movements of the user’s index finger.
• Sixth Sense also implements augmented reality projecting information onto objects the user interacts with. For example a paper newspaper can be augmented with projected dynamic live information.

The system recognizes a user's free hand gestures as well as icons/symbols drawn in the air with the index finger, for example:

• A 'framing' gesture takes a picture of the scene. The user can stop by any surface or wall and flick through the photos he/she has taken.
• Drawing a magnifying glass symbol takes the user to the map application while a ‘@’ symbol lets the user check his mail.
• The gesture of drawing a circle on the user’s wrist projects an analog watch

Gesture Recognition 

It is a technology which is aimed at interpreting human gestures with the help of mathematical algorithms. Gesture recognition technique basically focuses on the emotion recognition from the face and hand gesture recognition. Gender recognition technique enables humans to interact with computers in a more direct way without using any external interfacing devices. It can provide a much better alternative to text user interfaces and graphical user interface which requires the need of a keyboard or mouse to interact with the computer. An interface which solely depends on the gestures requires precise hand pose tracking. In the early versions of gesture recognition process special type of hand gloves which provide information about hand position orientation and flux of the fingers. In the Sixth Sense devices coloured bands are used for this purpose. Once hand pose has been captured the gestures can be recognized using different techniques. Neural network approaches or statistical templates are the commonly used techniques used for the recognition purposes. This technique has an high accuracy usually showing accuracy of more than 95%. Time dependent neural network will also be used for real time recognition of the gestures

APPLICATION 

The sixth sense technology finds a lot of application in the modern world. The sixth sense devices bridge the gap by bringing the digital world into the real world and in that process allowing the users to interact with the information without the help of any machine interfaces. Prototypes of the sixth sense device have demonstrated viability, usefulness and flexibility of this new technology. According to the words of its developers the extend of use of this new device is only limited by the imagination of human beings

 

The sixth sense recognizes the objects around us and displays the information relating to those objects in a real time environment. The sixth sense technology allows the user to interact the information through hand gestures. This is a quiet efficient way compared to the text and graphic based user interface. It has the potential to form the transparent user interface for accessing the information around us.

# BitSprint Team

Robotics (BitSprint View)

Robots can do a lot for us: they can explore space or they can cut our toenails. But do advances in robotics and artificial intelligence hold hidden threats?

What can robots do for us?
Robots have two very different roles. The first is to operate in locations that humans can't reach, such as the aftermaths of accidents in mines, oil-rigs and nuclear power stations. The second, also deeply unglamorous, is to help elderly or disabled people with everyday life: tying shoelaces, cutting toenails and suchlike. Moreover, if robots can be miniaturised, they can perhaps be used inside our bodies for monitoring our health, undertaking surgery, and so forth.

Should we be scared by advances in artificial intelligence?

Those who should be worried are the futurologists who believe in the so-called 'singularity', when robots take over and themselves create even more sophisticated progeny. And another worry is that we are increasingly dependent on computer networks, and that these could behave like a single 'brain' with a mind of its own, and with goals that may be contrary to human welfare.
                                 To understand what underscores these fears, we need to understand science and technology as having a particular and exclusionary kind of mimesis. Mimesis is the way we copy and imitate. In creating artificial intelligence machines and robots we are copying the human. Part of what we copy is related to the psychic world of the maker, and then the maker is copying ideas, techniques and practices into the machine that are given by the cultural spirit (the science, technology, and life) of the moment. All these factors are fused together in the making of artificial intelligence and robots. So we have to ask why it is also so frightening to make this copy. Not all fear a robotic uprising; many people welcome machine intelligence and see it as wonderful opportunity to create a new life. So to understand why some fear and some embrace you really have to know what models of mimesis go into the making of robots.

BitSprint Recommends:

We have already seen the damaging effects of simplest forms of artificial self-replicating intelligence in the form of computer viruses. But in this case, the real intelligence is the malicious designer. Critically, the benefits of computers outweigh the damage that computer viruses cause. Similarly, while there may be misuses of robotics in the near future, the benefits that they will bring are likely to outweigh these negative aspects. We think it is reasonable to be concerned that we may reach a time when robotic intelligence outstrips humans' and robots are able to design and produce robots more advanced than them.

# BitSprint Team