Pranav Mistry

Pranav Mistry grew up in Palanpur, a small town in Gujarat, where computers were scarce and expensive, and he has said he learned much of his early programming from library books and secondhand manuals rather than hands-on access to machines. He studied computer engineering in India before going on to a master's degree and then a PhD at the MIT Media Lab in the United States, joining a research culture built around building strange, working prototypes rather than only writing papers.

There he built SixthSense, a device combining a small projector, a camera and a mobile phone, worn around the neck, that let a person interact with digital information projected directly onto their hands, a wall or an object in front of them, tracked using coloured markers on the fingers. A 2009 demonstration of the prototype, showing gestures used to dial a phone number in the air or pull up information about a newspaper by pointing at it, was watched by millions online at a time when smartphones were still new and wearable computing was largely theoretical.

He later became head of research and then head of Samsung's STAR Labs, working on interface and AI research for consumer devices, and has continued to argue that computing should move off screens and into the physical objects and gestures people already use without thinking about them.