Your Smartphone is Now Way Smarter Than You

A team of hyper-geniuses at MIT’s Media Lab has designed a cellphone type device that gathers data on the environment around you, searches for information using the Internet, aggregates the results, and presents it back to you on a screen. It’s your life only better! This is according to an article today in Fast Company.

Dr. Pattie Maes demonstrated the system at the TED conference. “It comprises an off-the-shelf webcam, mirrors, smartphone and a pico-projector all hung on a lanyard. The device recognizes the movements of the user’s hands via the webcam (and color-coded finger-gloves worn on index finger and thumb,) enabling gesture-commands like the classic “frame” gesture which makes the device snap a photo,” according to Fast Company.

Frightened yet? Say you’re in a bookstore. “The device could recognize a book the user selects and project information onto it–such as its Amazon rating, or annotated notes. A newspaper would prompt the device to search for relevant news video clips, while an unrecognized person might prompt the display to show their contact details and so on.”

What’s the name of this new applicaton? Sixth Sense.

More from the article: “It’s only a research project now, but it’s a glimpse at the power future gadgets may possess–essentially it would give the wearer access to data on almost any object they encounter, make 3D GoogleMaps seem trivial, and bring online social networking to the ‘real world’ in a wholly new way. Most of this data is accesible via the net and a traditional notebook PC already, but the Fluid Interfaces group is re-thinking the way we interact with the world without requiring us to change our normal behavior.”