How about getting a sixth sense? Impossible, you say? Well, maybe not, if you’re getting some help from MIT Media Lab’s new Fluid Interfaces Group.

SixthSense is the name of a device Pattie Maes, associate professor in MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences and founder of the Fluid Interfaces Group, presented at this year’s TED, an annual conference that brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers. Pranav Mistry, Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, is the “brain” behind SixthSense, who actually designed and implemented the whole system.

Take a cellphone, a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. Put everything together so that you can wear it like a pendant around your neck, and you’re almost there. Now, use the cellphone to connect you to the information avaliable online. Et voila. You just created a wearable gestural interface that lets you use natural hand gestures to interact with that information – your SixthSense.

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Here is how it actually works: “The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.”

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Some, already working, applications for which you could use the SixthSense are: “The map application lets the user navigate a map displayed on a nearby surface using hand gestures, similar to gestures supported by Multi-Touch based systems, letting the user zoom in, zoom out or pan using intuitive hand movements. The drawing application lets the user draw on any surface by tracking the fingertip movements of the user’s index finger. SixthSense also recognizes user’s freehand gestures (postures). For example, the SixthSense system implements a gestural camera that takes photos of the scene the user is looking at by detecting the ‘framing’ gesture. (…) The SixthSense system also augments physical objects the user is interacting with by projecting more information about these objects projected on them. For example, a newspaper can show live video news or dynamic information can be provided on a regular piece of paper. The gesture of drawing a circle on the user’s wrist projects an analog watch.”

Another amazing thing is that the current prototype system costs approximate $350 to build.

Tim Berners-Lee, who is considered the father of the World Wide Web, talked about the next version of the WWW as he envisions it, at this year’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference at the Performing Arts Center in Long Beach, California.

“For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.”