CSAIL alum here, at the risk of being accused of inter-lab rivalry, I have got to say the Media lab has a reputation of being the "Marketing dept of MIT". A Wired article a while back referred to them as "all icing and no cake". The "sixth sense project" for example, was one I thought was more worthy of an undergraduate project, than MIT Doctoral research.
I wish Media lab refocuses in enormous resources & talent on advancing science, and significantly dial-down the show-biz aspects of the Media Lab.
Yes. You are absolutely right that Media lab does a lot of marketing work. I worked with an MIT-graduated professor as a grad student for a few months. When he joined my then grad school, he recently got his PhD. The first thing he did as an assistant prof was to teach his students on how to promote their work. He even showed us a slide deck from MIT Media lab that basically teaches you how to do just that (promote your work and make presentations look fantastic).
True to his roots, the guy was pretty good at promoting his work (although, having worked on the system he was developing at that time for a bit, I highly doubt the outcome of his project is as good as he made them look like) and he always made sure to get his work featured one way or another in media (be it University publication, local newspapers and through non-profit media channels).
I'm genuinely shocked to hear you characterize Sixth Sense in that way - to me it was a striking new idea. And the research - do you feel it was poor because it was HCI? What was the lack that you saw?
HCI & gestural computing is a very important and active area of research. BTW it's also my field of work. I was taking issue with what I (and quite a few of my colleagues) felt was a demo cobbled together using existing technologies for applause lines. There was nothing novel in it, except that it was presented as a "package".
It'd have been great if Pranav had researched a completely new modality of recognizing gestures, using Wi-Fi signals for example, or EMG - and that would have been befitting of an MIT Ph.D!
I wish Media lab refocuses in enormous resources & talent on advancing science, and significantly dial-down the show-biz aspects of the Media Lab.