What Happened to SixthSense by Pranav Misty

Question

Let's face it.. it was a thing, a mind-blowing concept that makes you feel like you are dreaming while watching his presentation. It was truly "ahead of its time" back then.. However, at present time, with the buzz around VR-AR and recently, this "metaverse" thing, I didn't arrive to any mentions of the SixthSense or its creator, so I was wondering for a quite time now whether the idea was acquired by an AR-VR company or Pranav got hired, for this specific project, by a tech company.For those landed here by curiosity, welcome to SixthSense, watch now https://youtu.be/YrtANPtnhyg

IshKebab · Accepted Answer

I suspect it was one of those tech demos that actually doesn't really work in reality.
Nobody wants a camera & projector attached to their head. Gesture based interfaces are universally terrible, even if they look cool in films. You probably underestimate how much you move your head around while looking at things. Projectors don't work well in daylight. Etc. Etc.
Cool tech demo though.

ctoth · Answer

Ha! I e-mailed this guy back in 2009 to talk about the potential of the tech for blind users (sixth sense could be a fifth for the blind) and he never got back to me. Haven't thought about this in years. Thanks OP!

PH01 · Answer

The SixthSense talk and the associated hype in 2009 was terrible. It was impossible to convince the majority that the cuts of demos in the TED talk were effectively choreographed set pieces, even though many scenes required tech which didn’t work like that.
The whole thing was hyped as “open” and liberating. Nothing was released until the hype died down (2011). What was released was not even close to the talk, it gained no traction and never iterated past v0.1.
SixthSense was a prime example of deliberate misinformation coming from academia. MIT Media Lab won a huge number of awards, Mistry was touted as a genius, and then absolutely nothing happened.

chabad360 · Answer

It's seems you can find the (unfortunately unmaintained) code on GitHub: https://github.com/sixthsense/sixthsense and Google code: https://code.google.com/archive/p/sixthsense/

newsoul · Answer

I think he worked for Samsung : https://www.pranavmistry.com/

vedran · Answer

Reminds me of Dynamicland: https://dynamicland.org/ from Bret Victor.Which was previously discussed on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725370

ajankelo · Answer

Thanks for sharing this talk. Looks like Pranav is the founder of Two.ai: https://www.two.ai/about