Sixth sense technology

Indian Geek Develops 'Sixth Sense' Device

Use hand gestures to click pictures or send mails

28-year-old Pranav Mistry, a MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) based researcher hailing from Gujarat has created  a digital prototype of a "sixth sense" device that is being currently evaluated by corporations including Google, Microsoft, HP and Samsung.

To briefly describe what this sixth sense is all about, we need to understand how the current dissemination of information from current electronic devices takes place. Most of the information from computers, mobile phones and other devices are confined to screen or paper - if we decide to take a print. However, the sixth sense, according to Mistry, bridges this gap "bringing intangible digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures". The concept falls under "wearable computing" -- the same category under which the ubiquitous mobile phone falls as well.

The equipment list for the sixth sense might seem a tad crude, but it does its job quite well. It comprises a pocket projector; mirror and web camera bundled in a wearable pendant-like mobile. With the help of the projector, you can turn any material surface into a touchscreen. The camera is used to "see" the hand gestures. The user will however need to wear color-coded gloves on the index finger and the thumb so that the hand movements can be recorded and decrypted.

Some of the interesting hand gestures include drawing a square frame which will trigger a command to take a picture, drawing the @ sign will let the user access his email. You can even write e-mails with the help of the projector, which projects an image of a virtual keyboard so that you can type. All this costs around $350 (Rs. 17,000) to build - which is not a bad for something as futuristic as this!

Mistry has been approached by a couple of Indian companies who seem to be interested in his project. However, he wants the technology to be a little cheaper before it comes to India.

The Future is in the Cloud

Microsoft is changing tracks: the software giant now sees the importance of web-based services ,even though some of these edges have been around for a while already.

 

Windows 7 certainly got its fair share of attention when it was first shown off,but another announcement made by the microsoft at the same time might just turn out to be a lot more important.At the annual professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, the company’s new chief architect Ray Ozzie introduced Microsoft’s agenda for the coming years.The group wants to capture the Internet market

with new platforms and services,and Ozzie underscored the historical  significance of the move by saying “It’s the transformation of our software; it’s the transformation of our strategy and our offerings across the board to fundamentally embrace services”. The vehicle which take Microsoft on that transformational journey , he revealed,is Windows Azure a new “cloud computing “ platform designed to offer users access to computing applications on any Internet-connected device from anywhere on planet.

What is cloud computing?

Users traditionally use softwares installed on their terminals , whether these are desktop PCs,laptops,cellphones or other devices.For bussines and enterprise scenarios ,individual servers or racks of them operate behind the scenes ,depending on the type of applications they need to support and the scale of the organization.When these companies have millions of customers who uses their websites and online services,they need to maintain massive data centres to ensure constant speed and uptime(which might involve multiple physical locations around the world).
The web is fast becoming the primary contact of contact for businesses,which means they can’t go offline when demand peaks.For example a shopping site that can’t deal with a spike in traffic during a holiday season will go offline ,causing massive business looses as well as customer dissatisfaction.On the flip side ,investments in processing power of this magnitude will not always be worthwhile .If it’s night time in North America,servers there are almost idle whereas those in India are under full load since it is day time here.

                                                   With cloud computing ,processing loads can be easily redistributed between idle servers.By hosting applications on a platform that consists of millions of distributed centres around the world rather than a single server ,customers don’t have to worry about uptime,latency,capacity,power supply,or even natural disasters and geopolitical events .Paying for only the server capacity you need means you can scale your infrastructure requirements fairly easily,based on peaks and valleys in user demand.Meanwhile the hosts of cloud use advanced virtualisations techniques to host multiple clients ,but not necessarily on individual machines or in single physical locations.This greatly optimizes space,power consumption and overall costs , and works out particularly well for small start-ups which don’t know how much demand their services can cope with and how much power they must purchase at the outset .Some might even need to rent bursts of power to analyze complex simulations every now and then.the cloud automatically provides them with required capacity also redistributes load evenly…………