I remember a time when the AR news was not about consumer products and was read in little pockets of the internet and amongst "Kit" obsessed übergeeks who strapped cameras to their heads and wore "wearable computers" which, at the time, were backpacks with pcs in them. They wanted to show everyone how cool it was, but your average person, is unwilling to wear a backpack computer with a camera on a bike helmet and walk into a public place anywhere.

In July I met Neogence CEO Robert Rice and had a long chat about the challenges of AR. His big concern, now that Augmented Reality is becoming as much a household term as Virtual Reality once was, is in the danger of hype. AR is the robust and realistic descendant of VR. We have made it a long way from Johnny Mnemonic and VRML, but risky investments and hype-bubble conditions won't speed development of the field. I can't remember his exact words, thankfully Twitter does. Anyone working in AR today who was around to see the unbelievable spending during the much hyped and never realized age of VR generally steers clear of hype and speaks with at tone of harsh realism.

Then there is the man with the colored tape on his fingers. The one who says anyone can make their own device, that immerses them in a gestural user interface, projects a tag cloud of related keywords on the chest of a person it recognizes, turns a wall into a touch interface, can make a normal index card into a tilt video game and costs around $300. He knows because he's wearing his around his neck.

His name is Pranav Mistry, a PhD student at MIT's Media lab, and he wants to make it all open source and free. I checked that claim, and though there's no source code to be found, there are also no
MIT Labs Pending Patent Applications that claim to own his inventions. He may indeed be the best thing that could happen to hype. The real thing. We can only hope that when he publishes his code, the emerging crop of fresh new Augmented Reality developers will take the ball and run with it.

More info on SixthSense here: http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/

As always, there's more than an hour of video related to this post in the masthead above. But I'll start you off with the TED Talk that unveiled the vision: