another interesting TED video
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html
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A very slick demo, but one that largely reflects the ‘consumerization’ of technology - what used to require handbuilt and expensive prototypes is now mostly available off the shelf.
The 2 underlying primary technologies here are physical gesture interfaces and wearable environment / location aware systems, aka “augmented reality”. I’m not sure exactly how old the first is, but it goes back at least as far as the “put that there” system done at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman quite some time ago. The second goes back to the early to mid-90s, with work done at the Wearable Computing group at MIT (a peer group of the group that Patti is in), Columbia University (Steve Feiner, who coined the term “augmented reality”), Boeing (me and several others in the group I was in), and later Georgia Tech (Thad Starner, ex-MIT) and University of Toronto (Steve Mann, ex-MIT). The primary difference between the system in the demo and the systems worked on in the above groups was that the information that was publicly displayed in the demo on an external surface was instead displayed privately in a transparent monocular head-mounted display (HMD). Both private and public displays have their advantages and disadvantages. We did a system that did face recognition so that when you met someone again it brought up notes about who they are, when you last saw them, what you talked about, etc. and showed this to you in your HMD. Depending on the contents of your notes about that person, they may or may not be suitable for public display.
Chris