Sixth Sense: A Web you can wear

Among Mr. Lamis’s predictions: Sixth Sense’s current projector will eventually give way to contact lenses that overlay data directly onto a person’s field of vision.

In places where we now find fixed advertisements, like posters or billboards, we will see ads calibrated to our exact location and interests, he says. We will effortlessly access virtual conversations, like those on Twitter, about the people, places, and events we come across in person.

And Sixth Sense-type computers with advanced facial recognition capabilities, Lamis says, might show information about the people we pass on the street. We would know if he donated to a political candidate, if she writes an environmentally themed blog, or if he appears in a database of registered child predators – all in real time.

“People in different areas are thinking about this as viable for consumers down the road,” Lamis says. “It [will have] really profound implications for how [we] ultimately see the world.”

Of course, those applications are a long way off. As Lamis points out, they will depend on improvements to related technologies, such as strength of wireless networks and size of computer chips.

They will also have to wait for a Sixth Sense business model. The MIT researchers have a patent on the way, but they are unsure what form their current prototype will take when it first hits store shelves. Mistry says it may eventually develop into a streamlined, all-in-one device.

The university has tinkered with several iterations of wearable computers over the years. Mistry’s model won’t be the last. But it has captured public interest like none of its predecessors.

Mistry and Ms. Maes presented Sixth Sense at the prestigious Technology, Design and Environment conference in February. Mistry now receives hundreds of e-mails each day about the technology – from artists who want to change the way they draw to hospital staff who want seamless access to patients’ vital signs.

Sixth Sense has also attracted attention from those working on more literal sixth senses.

Todd Huffman runs an Internet company in Phoenix that has developed a system of using GPS data from cellphones to automatically group photos by location. In 2004, Mr. Huffman had a magnet surgically inserted into his fingertip to study the utility of cochlear implants for the hearing-impaired.

The difference between a magnetic implant and an instrument that detects currents – the same distinction between a Sixth Sense experience and pulling out a smart phone – is an important one, Huffman says.

He describes how the magnet in his hand gives him an intuitive understanding of where large, out-of-sight electrical objects are near him, the result of feeling currents without intentionally seeking them. The more effortless an observation, Huffman believes, the more people can productively tailor their behavior to that information. “Right now, we’re just getting to the phase where people appreciate how an “immersive” digital environment can be as complex and rich as sensation,” he says. “It seems like a weird thing to most people.”

Such an environment, with its more relentless ubiquity of information, may also pose new challenges. We may become increasingly dependent on Sixth Sense-type devices, some worry, and others question whether people will become distracted or even anxious as a result of mass quantities of this instant wisdom. Privacy concerns may also come to the fore as our digital personas become part of our in-person ones.

But the Sixth Sense team, along with its growing fan club, remains quite excited about the future.

“You could almost argue that the online world is more exciting than the real world,” Maes says.

Soon, they hope, they will be one and the same.

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