Amazing Pranav Mistry: Thrilling Potential of SixthSense technology

From TEDIndia: Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.”

More amazingly, at the end of the video during the Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to allow others to work on the technology and realize its full potential. Verily, bring it to the masses! How very bold! MIT intellectual property personnel are groaning.

Several questions come to mind:

• What are the challenges to bringing this to the masses?
• Where do you think such a technology is most likely to be deployed first?
• Will Mr Mistry himself benefit from this, or will it be the next tier of technology companies that will profit most?
• Why did it take a kid from India, doing graduate work at MIT, to develop this?
• Why didn’t a company like Microsoft, with billions of dollars of R&D funding, not come up with this?
• And finally, how do we leverage this to help bring clean water to kids, or provide a decent education to girls in rural India?
• What questions do you have?

In the video, Mr Mistry talks about kicking around a virtual ball on the floor of the Boston Red-line! One of these days, I hope to see him on the Red-Line! Yaay!

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Here is the TED talk by Pattie Maes of MIT’s Media Lab, where Pranav is developing this technology. Pattie was kind enough to give credit to Pranav and did not try to hog all the credit. But she did want to be the first to ‘unveil’ this technology. She should have afforded that right to Pranav Mistry. Thanks to Sue (see comment below) for the link to this video.