Pattie Maes of MIT’s Media Lab wants to give you a sixth sense. You probably want it… but it’s still a little clunky right now. And requires you to wear plastic market caps on your finger. But it’s really cool.

Maes reminds us that we pull in information about the world with our five senses, and make decisions based on this sensory input. These days, we often have an additional sense - our ability to use networked information to add to our knowledge. At TED, we’d really like the ability to meet someone and immediately Google to figure out who they are. Or at the supermarket, we’d like to overlay data about environmental and corporate responsibility on top of the products we buy. We can access this information, but it’s inconvenient and socially awkward to do so.

The solution to social awkwardness? Hang some devices around your neck and stick colored caps onto four fingers. The system includes a wearable camera, a mirror and a battery-powered projector. This allows the wearer - currently grad student and hacker Pranav Mistry - to project information onto surfaces. He’s able to manipulate this information by moving his colored fingers - they re tracked by the camera and allow Pranav to manipulate the data, driven by his mobile phone.

The system looks a bit like Jeff Han’s multitouch interface and the Microsoft Surface computing, but points out that this is a solution that works on any surface. You might use it to reframe your shopping experience, projecting a rating from Amazon onto books in books in a bookstore, or adding reviews from a favorite critic. You might enhance a newspaper with a projected video clip, or project a word cloud associated with someone onto their chest as you talked with them. And, of course, it’s trivial to project a watch on your arm.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is an exceedingly cool hack. Whether anyone will be wearing to wear it outside of the lab probably has something to do with how it’s designed, and how we construct social rules about what’s acceptable and not to enhance with information in a real-world environment. I can’t really imagine having the ability to project information onto people’s chests being socially acceptable - but I would love for it to become true.

More about the ideas behind this interface - which Maes declined to give a catchy name - at her page on “fluid interfaces“.

This post is part of a series from the TED 2009 conference held in Long Beach, California from February 4-8th. You can read other posts in the series here, and the TED site will release video from the talk in the coming weeks or months. You may also want to follow the conference via Twitter or through other blogs tagged as TED2009 on Technorati.