I've missed what might/might not for you already be a well-known TED talk -- Pattie Maes's and Pranav Mistry's demonstrations of the "sixth sense" projector technology -- at least three times now. Twice, in November and again at the end of January, I had a good excuse, stuck in the hospital. But that's the wonderful thing about the internet -- not only does information stick around, waiting for you to discover it, but it continually churns itself to the surface, as other readers bring it to your attention, shifting it from the archive to circulation. In this case, I can thank Martyn Daniels.

It's a fairly straightforward idea: you use a camera, projector, cellular phone, a few other inexpensive components, and lots of software code to create interfaces that recognize "natural"/mimetic gestures on an informational layer that's projected onto ordinary objects.

(Huh?)

Yeah, maybe that's hard to explain (or at least explain well). The TED presenters use the digital interfaces of Minority Report as a shorthand -- which, when added to "sixth sense," makes me think about movies about dead children/detectives, rather than the future of reading. (I actually think Iron Man didn't get enough credit for its interfaces -- can we use that as a reference instead?)

Actually, maybe the easiest thing to do is to watch the following videos to see what the fuss is about:

(This second one is my favorite)

Mistry also has a TED interview that's worth reading.

So why am I interested in this gadgety business -- apart from feelings of guilt whenever it seems like Bookfuturism.com is less about the future of reading than its recent past?

Well, there's that. But there are also a few trends that the "sixth sense" device crystallizes, at least for me:

1) Ubiquitous, ultraportable computing;
2) "Natural-language" gestures and ordinary objects;
3) Increasing sophistication/importance of scanning/recognition software;
4) The centrality of reading, as an action and a metaphor, as part of both an unconscious/computationally driven event AND as a conscious, screen-dependent action;
5) This one's explicitly stated by Mistry as a question in his TEDIndia talk: "How can we leverage our knowledge of everyday gestures with ordinary objects to our interaction with the digital world?"

The last also gets a slightly different spin: "We humans are actually not very interested in computing. What we are interested in is information -- especially information about the physical world around us."

But in addition to sliding between the physical and digital worlds, this also might point the way towards cutting this Gordian knot of dedicated/single-use devices vs. multimedia devices. Instead of asking, "why should we be bound to a single kind of application?" we can ask, "why should we bound to a single kind of screen?"

Now, the answer -- just as with that of the dedicated machine/multimedia device -- is a complicated one. Inexpensive projection usually winds up being kind of crummy-looking projection. There might be room for a ubiquitous lo-fi projection/recognition system in your life, but if its relationship to the range of computing and entertainment screens that are already in it is additive, rather than integrating or subtracting, then it seems like we've missed an opportunity to actually reshape the field, rather than just adding something that's fun and geeky to show off.

I don't know. But I keep coming back to this idea, which I think is an exciting one, that the proliferation of digital devices is directly correlated to a proliferation of literacy -- that the more of these devices we use, the more we read, the greater variety of literacies we employ -- and that we will experience this profusion of literacy not as a radical break with either our computational or analog literacies but as largely continuous with both. This prospect, to me, is both cool and fun.