The SixthSense talk and the associated hype in 2009 was terrible. It was impossible to convince the majority that the cuts of demos in the TED talk were effectively choreographed set pieces, even though many scenes required tech which didn’t work like that.
The whole thing was hyped as “open” and liberating. Nothing was released until the hype died down (2011). What was released was not even close to the talk, it gained no traction and never iterated past v0.1.
SixthSense was a prime example of deliberate misinformation coming from academia. MIT Media Lab won a huge number of awards, Mistry was touted as a genius, and then absolutely nothing happened.
I thought something similar to this but not exactly like you described it.
Initially, I had the impression that this "SixthSense" phenomenon was one of those concepts tagged as "Fake It Until You Make It", but apparently, it was not. Probably, there was no PoC, just some cinematic-video "montage" to create a buzz around it, then soon, it evaporated.
IMHO, a close comparison to this in recent years is probably "Theranos" & "Nikola", where they created the buzz, in fact, a lot of hype for something that did not exist in the first place.
The whole thing was hyped as “open” and liberating. Nothing was released until the hype died down (2011). What was released was not even close to the talk, it gained no traction and never iterated past v0.1.
SixthSense was a prime example of deliberate misinformation coming from academia. MIT Media Lab won a huge number of awards, Mistry was touted as a genius, and then absolutely nothing happened.