A lot has happened since 2009—the year when Pranav Mistry, the Indian technology wizard who is currently working as a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, US, unveiled the ‘Sixthsense’ technology. ‘Sixthsense’ is a wearable gestural interface that allows user

So hardware-wise it is very simple. The plus point of these hardware components is that they are cheap and going smaller and smaller every month, leave alone a year.

If you view the video presentation I made at TED (http://bit.ly/2gdyfj), you will observe that I am just making a gesture of taking a picture and the picture is actually getting clicked. To do this, the system needs to understand the gesture the user is making. So the key intelligence that has gone in Sixthsense is actually in gathering the understanding of the scene and deciding what to project, where to project, what is in front of the user, what kind of gestures the user is making, etc.

All this intelligence comes from the computer-vision software and machine-learning technology. The camera also sees what the user sees. It not only captures the gestures but also the scene and objects around it. Like, if the user holds a book in his hands, the camera matches the cover of the book with the cover of thousands of books available online. Once a match is struck, it can tell you the price, user reviews and also whether your friends already have a copy of the book or not.

How does the device search over the Internet?

The device is connected to the cloud. It uses a lot of search engine application program interfaces (APIS) like Amazon APIS. As it connects you to the Internet world, it enables access to all the dynamic information/data while you continue to be in the physical world.