Welcome to the future

I showed this video to rapturous applause in my final class at Upward Bound. The speaker is Pranav Mistry, a young Indian technologist at MIT. He outlines the development of his Sixth Sense system of augmented reality. The video starts off rather slowly, but as we works through the evolution of his thinking and demonstrates more and more audacious applications of the technology, it becomes rather a thrill-ride. This technology has so many potential uses that it’s hard to believe that it won’t be in widespread use within a few years. I’d imagine the next step is having the augmentative imagery displayed in a head-up fashion, using glasses or even (eventually) contacts.

I especially appreciate the way that Mistry talks about us ceasing to be machines sitting in front of machines, and instead humanizes technology by making it a natural part of the way we interact with the world. In Mistry’s vision, technology is like air — ubiquitous and taken for granted. At the moment our digital world is confined within various rectangles. It’s rather as if we had to carry all our air around in bottles. Mistry allows the digital world and the analog world to blend seamlessly, so that we simply use it, the way we simply use oxygen.

Anyway, here’s the video. Enjoy!