I have spoken about the impact of multi-touch computer screens on the catalogue display, including the work of Jeff Han and Microsoft Surface. Now Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry from MIT unveil the latest development, SixthSense.
‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.
When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it; that information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.
Beyond the influence something like this would have on library services, for example, the ultimate roving reference or patron’s getting information from books via the catalog as they take them off the shelves (see the video at 5:53), imagine what this would mean for the library’s physical space. As the image must be projected onto a surface, it offers numerous possibilities for interaction between the environment and the information you are seeking. Is this the beginning of Information Decoration as described by Koert van Mensvoort?
We use these flat rectangular objects to inform ourselves about the state of our world. Computer-monitor workers are the assembly line workers of the 21st century. We use screens to check our e-mail, screens to monitor safety on the streets, screens to follow fashion; our scientists use screens to explore the outer limits of the universe and to descend into the structures of our genes. A painful truth: many of us spend more time with computer monitors than with our own friends and families.
…The merging of virtual and physical spaces is an inevitable development, and we should welcome it….
The million-dollar question is: How do we integrate all those indispensable information streams into our environment? Besides the fact that we can learn a lot from old nature, where information is present in a well-integrated way, I think we can learn from the decorative world. For centuries, people have been utilising decorative patterns, indoors and out, with the aim of improving and giving an identity to the atmosphere around them. The primary goal is not information but aesthetics. What happens if we start looking at every pattern in our environment as a possible information carrier? Look around you, wherever you are. Try to recognise all of the forms and patterns in the space. The flowered wallpaper, the humming of the air-conditioning, the fish in the aquarium, a shadow on the wall. Do you realise how few of the patterns in our environment are being used as information carriers?
