The Minority Report

I predict in 5 years men will be wearing nail polish and liking it. All snarkiness aside, those people at MIT are just freaking geniuses. I can’t say it enough. Check out the links below for other cool MIT projects.

Update: I figured the Glue Sniffing Chickens would pick the correct MIT posts at the bottom but they didn’t.  Click on the MIT tag for more MITiny goodness.

Oh snap!! She mentions this blog!! Around 4:47 minutes in. I swear!! She says “live out your fantasy of writing on a dumb blog called The Minority Report”.

$350 dollars for this thing? Totally worth it but it’s got to be faster. I noticed a lag time of about 2 seconds per command and lookup. It’s pretty impressive and something that I totally want. I think it should be mounted in a pair of glasses for both the “screen” and the camera but damn it’s cool.

This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense | Video on TED.com

Pattie Maes was the key architect behind what was once called “collaborative filtering” and has become a key to Web 2.0: the immense engine of recommendations — or “things like this” — fueled by other users. In the 1990s, Maes’ Software Agents program at MIT created Firefly, a technology (and then a startup) that let users choose songs they liked, and find similar songs they’d never heard of, by taking cues from others with similar taste. This brought a sea change in the way we interact with software, with culture and with one another.

Now Maes is working on a similarly boundary-breaking initiative. Her newly founded Fluid Interfaces Group, also part of the MIT Media Lab, aims to rethink the ways in which humans and computers interact, partially by redefining both human and computer. In Maes’ world (and really, in all of ours), the computer is no longer a distinct object, but a source of intelligence that’s embedded in our environment. By outfitting ourselves with digital accessories, we can continually learn from (and teach) our surroundings. The uses of this tech — from healthcare to home furnishings, warfare to supermarkets — are powerful and increasingly real.Pattie Maes | Profile on TED.com

Pranav Mistry is a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. Before his studies at MIT, he worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher. Mistry is passionate about integrating the digital informational experience with our real-world interactions.

Some previous projects from Mistry’s work at MIT includes intelligent sticky notes, Quickies, that can be searched and can send reminders; a pen that draws in 3D; and TaPuMa, a tangible public map that can act as Google of physical world. His research interests also include Gestural and Tangible Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, AI, Machine Vision, Collective Intelligence and Robotics.Pranav Mistry | Profile on TED.com