As good as most of them are it’s a rare TED video that makes you want to stand and applaud with the crowd even though you’re only stream­ing a record­ing of a past event. But this TED Talk by Pranav Mis­try has some truly jaw-dropping stuff, par­tic­u­larly for those who haven’t much con­sid­ered the extent to which we could be inter­fac­ing our dig­i­tal world our the nat­ural one. Some of this looks like gen­uine sci­ence fic­tion. Haven’t heard of him? I hadn’t either. “Pranav Mis­try is a PhD stu­dent in the Fluid Inter­faces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. Before his stud­ies at MIT, he worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher; he’s a grad­u­ate of IIT. Mis­try is pas­sion­ate about inte­grat­ing the dig­i­tal infor­ma­tional expe­ri­ence with our real-world inter­ac­tions.” He is also the inven­tor of SixthSense.

‘Sixth­Sense’ is a wear­able ges­tural inter­face that aug­ments the phys­i­cal world around us with dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion and lets us use nat­ural hand ges­tures to inter­act with that infor­ma­tion. By using a cam­era and a tiny pro­jec­tor mounted in a pen­dant like wear­able device, ‘Sixth­Sense’ sees what you see and visu­ally aug­ments any sur­faces or objects we are inter­act­ing with. It projects infor­ma­tion onto sur­faces, walls, and phys­i­cal objects around us, and lets us inter­act with the pro­jected infor­ma­tion through nat­ural hand ges­tures, arm move­ments, or our inter­ac­tion with the object itself. ‘Sixth­Sense’ attempts to free infor­ma­tion from its con­fines by seam­lessly inte­grat­ing it with real­ity, and thus mak­ing the entire world your computer.

Yeah. Just wait ’till you see the video.

This TED Talk is from Ted India and is part of TED’s “Under 30″ series, which includes peo­ple like Eva Vertes, who I’ve pre­vi­ously men­tioned as part of my encour­age­ment to Think Dif­fer­ently. Pranav Mis­try is another great exam­ple of some­one who is think­ing dif­fer­ently, ask­ing ques­tions and attempt­ing to answer them. This is where true inno­va­tion is found.