The MIT Media Lab project Funamizu ripped off is an interesting concept, but a projected UI mounted on a person is very impractical with today’s technology, and Pattie Maes did not do a good job selling the idea at the TED talk she gave, in my opinion. For example, she cited pulling up the impracticality of finding information about a person with a cellphone while meeting them for the first time before she segued into projected interfaces. Lo and behold, she later showed the device project some guy’s info onto his shirt.

She also noted that such a system would be fairly inexpensive in the near future as they cobbled their prototype together for $300-something. She ignored that: first, their design is relatively bulky, and would need considerable miniaturization before being mass marketable; second, it lags to the point of being barely usable and would need considerably more powerful hardware; third, stabilizing the interface on an object isn’t the most straightforward task, especially if both the projector and surface are in fidgety, hard-to-predict motion; fourth, wearing something to color your fingertips is tacky and rather intrusive, and allowing the system to resolve finger gestures without colored nubs would require (again) considerably more powerful hardware. While I don’t doubt that it could be done and that someday, it could be cheap, that’s a pretty damn good way away. She gave a possible time frame of 10 years. I think that it would be at least 20, much like multitouch UIs.

That’s not even going into such issues as privacy for the user, obtrusiveness for those around the user, UI consistency, on top of more typical concerns like battery life, durability, and whatnot. (On a side note, I suppose that’s to be expected, since this is from the MIT Media Lab, a smorgasbord of clever, interesting, and genuinely appealing concepts that – in and of themselves – lack arms, legs, and foresight. OLPC’s myriad troubles ought to ring a bell.)

Does Funamizu address any of that at all? No, he designed a glorified bracelet, played around with presenting it, and called it a concept. And of course, in typical Funamizu fashion, he had to add a piece of today’s technology that would be woefully obsolete by the time his design would even approach feasible – in this case, it’s WiFi.