What Happened to Sixth Sense & Pranav Mistry?

There was a time a few years ago when Pranav Mistry had become everyone’s favourite engineer-scientist. As part of the team that unveiled The Sixth Sense technology, Mistry mesmerized us. The coloured finger caps, the small and sleep projector-cum-camera, and the necessary theatrics of any tech launch led us to believe that the Sixth Sense was the future, and Mistry was the charioteer.

What the video shows is very far fetched and Pranav Mistry or MIT Media Lab never actually gave a demo of the device; they just showed the working using several videos. How many books have ever been published in all of modern history? According to Google’s advanced algorithms, the answer is nearly 130 million books, and they admitted that it’s practically impossible to count every book that has ever been written, so this is just estimate.

But then, you know, we were like, what happened?

 Pranav Mistry told that it was running on Windows 6.5, so if he had to bring it to market he would have to port it to run on a modern OS. That said, projects such as Google Goggles and Microsoft's rumoured competing product are all evolved forms of the concept. Microsoft is one of the investors/sponsors of MIT Media Lab, so they can use research from the media lab, including SixthSense, in their products. So we can assume that Microsoft's upcoming product will use some of the intellectual property created by Pranav Mistry. You can see some of their work on it here - LightSpace - Microsoft Research.

Do remember that SixthSense was a concept and not an actual product. For the concept to become available in the market various factors need to come together including battery technology, miniature versions of the Kinect camera and improvements in wireless data networks.

Meanwhile, Pranav Mistry’s moved on to other things. He’s currently heading the Think Tank Team and is the Director of Research of Samsung, where he’s busy developing the latest in Samsung’s arsenal of cutting edge technologies.                

That’s a pretty good job, I would think.

Couple of months ago, Mistry unveiled the new Samsung Gear ‘smartwatch’, which can call, message, take pictures, play music and run a host of other apps right from your wrist. By the way, Samsung overtook Apple as the world’s largest seller of smartphones last year. I feel pretty certain the tech has something to do with that.