Interaction Devices

One interesting interaction device is the Gestural Interface Device, Sixth sense, prototyped by Pranav Mistry, a PhD student from MIT.

The idea arose from how we interact in the physical world, meaning how we use gestures to interact with objects around us instead of input/output devices like a mouse and a keyboard. The idea came from the simple mouse that we all use, which used to have a ball kind of thing inside it. It has two rollers supporting the ball to track the direction of the ball and to decide what kind of action to perform based on the ball's position. The rollers were then made into a device which was placed on the hand and tracked the hand gestures and projected it onto the digital interface. Then slowly, this idea evolved into the gestural interface device which is used to communicate with the digital world using hand gestures. The main goal behind this technology was to connect the physical world with the digital world in an intuitive way and this also applies vice versa.

The concept of this gestural interface device involves a tiny projector and a camera which are linked to a portable computing device which co-ordinates the hand gestures and the visual content. It is really handy in the sense that you would just need to wear it around your neck along with your favourite necklace or chain and do many interesting and cool stuff with it. You can literally carry your digital world along with you, wherever you go.  You can use any empty wall or a piece of paper or even your own hands as an interface and project the digital information onto it.

Below is the video which further shows and explains how this type of interface device came about, how it works and what interesting things it can actually do.