Recently a young Indian PhD researcher at MIT invented a unique tool that attempts to bridge the gap between the real world and the digital world through an interface built using a maze of codes and data. It’s a tool that you can carry wherever you go just like your own mobile phone. It’s got a projector (mirror), a camera that acts like a human eye and computer vision software which has a capacity to rattle out millions of complex algorithms in seconds. The software is built to identify multi-touch freehand and iconic human gestures by users wearing photosensitive colored caps on human fingers and hands. The kit can be attached to mobile phone device connected to the Internet and BOOM!! A whole new way of browsing opens up right in front of you. You now suddenly do not need a computer monitor to surf the Internet. You can do so on any projecting surface around you.
Further the device is an intelligent contraption which has the capability to identify not just basic hand gestures but also read / recognize products or text or information using image recognition or marker technology and immediately connect you to the Internet to provide you with valuable information available there on the subject.
Isn't that fascinating?
Now although the product is still deep in research and unlikely to be available commercially very soon, it does leave us, marketers thinking of ways and means of leveraging the invention for digital savvy clients. I did a knit picking of my brain and came up with a few usages / implications...
Cost per Conversion (CPC)?: Imagine you happen to visit your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart on a Sunday morning to pick up replenishments for the week ahead. You suddenly see and fall in love with the latest range of hi-end notebooks from Dell and wish to pick up one immediately. While you compare the product through customer reviews on ZDNet, Amazon and the other reliable stalwart websites using Sixth Sense, you suddenly realize that the same notebook is available cheaper by about $100 on dell.com. And what's more, delivery in your area is guaranteed within the next 24 hours. So what's in it for you? Healthy competition between Wal-Mart and dell.com is always good for the customers - a classic case of price war between products available online as against a brick and mortar shop. What's in it for Dell? Almost no CPC, right! Real time dynamic online pricing enables volume off takes. Higher ROI, efficient targeting and more opportunities for brand building!
Geo targeting is the King's wise man: The advantage is now for both the parties. Both the marketing brand as well the king, the Customer get benefitted. So no more, mobile GPS is invasion of privacy, as the law chooses to call in some countries. Geo targeting is now mutually beneficial! King is likely to give up his privacy and open up windows to massive targeting which hitherto was restricted.
Convergence at its best: We all know that mobile communication and broadcast technology innovators around the world like NTT Docomo, Nokia, Vodafone have done tones of work in the past decade on wireless convergence. Over the years while technology became more and more superior, the human-end interface that took advantage of that technology became more and more smaller and more and more powerful. The ability of Sixth Sense to project screens on any surface is really not new as there are contraptions available dime a dozen which have that ability. Further the technology to track movement of photosensitive colored caps is in itself quite an old technique that forms a base for the study, called interaction design. But what sets Sixth Sense apart is its ability to leverage or converge all those technological innovations under one roof and build a contraption. Do we hear a distant cry of a slow and painful death of WAP enabled websites?
Does SEM on Google go beyond KWs?: Google, better shape up or ship out !!! Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their armory of experts need to do a bit of deep thinking here as Sixth Sense has the potential to wipe out their biggest share of their worth on NASDAQ. Do we see SEM on Google going beyond just KWs or even further than reverse image search that is available at http://tineye.com/. Do we see an outright buy out of the product patent in the offing? Or do we see an all new Google Earth? Only time will tell.
Click here read the blog owned by the creator himself, Pranav Mistry....http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/sixth_sense_pranav.php
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