Samsung research director and SixthSense inventor Pranav Mistry joins Startup Village advisory board

Pranav Mistry, the brain behind the SixthSense technology and the Samsung Gear Smartwatch, has joined the advisory board of the Kochi-based mobile-internet business incubator Startup Village. The 32-year-old head of the Think Tank Team and director (research) at Samsung Research America will advise budding entrepreneurs at the Startup Village working in the field of wearable computing and gestural interaction.

Mistry holds nearly a dozen patents and has worked on a number of projects across a wide range of fields, including interaction design, robotics, computer graphics, human-computer interactions, artificial intelligence, information graphics, embedded systems and social computing.

Mistry is best known for SixthSense, an intuitive, wearable gestural interface to bridge the physical and digital world, which he developed as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was also the one who introduced the Samsung Gear Smartwatch at its global launch last year. His other inventions include the invisible mouse, Sparsh, TeleTouch and BlinkBot.

"I am a partner in your dream to make India the next hub of innovation and love what you are doing at Startup Village. I would love to be part of it in whichever way I can," Mistry told the Startup Village team. "There is a revolution taking place in school and college campuses in India, and particularly in Kerala, much like the one that sowed the seeds of Silicon Valley in the US. I'm sure that the ideas being incubated at places like Startup Village today will form the core of the technologies of tomorrow."

Mistry is expected to visit Startup Village and interact with the entrepreneurs on his next visit to India. Other members of the advisory board include Kris Gopalakrishnan, Kiran Karnik and HK Mittal.

The Startup Village is already incubating RHLvision Interactive LLP, which has developed a gesture-based wearable device called 'Fin'. The product was launched on the crowd-funding platform Indiegogo, and is on its way to raise $100,000 in crowd-funding by mid-February.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)