At the MIT Media Lab, the Tangible Media Group believes the future of
computing is tactile. Unveiled today, the inFORM is MIT's new scrying
pool for imagining the interfaces of tomorrow. Almost like a table of
living clay, the inFORM is a surface that three-dimensionally changes
shape, allowing users to not only interact with digital content in
meatspace, but even hold hands with a person hundreds of miles away. And
that's only the beginning.
Created by Daniel Leithinger and Sean
Follmer and overseen by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, the technology behind
the inFORM isn't that hard to understand. It's basically a fancy
Pinscreen, one of those executive desk toys that allows you to create a
rough 3-D model of an object by pressing it into a bed of flattened
pins. With inFORM, each of those "pins" is connected to a motor
controlled by a nearby laptop, which can not only move the pins to
render digital content physically, but can also register real-life
objects interacting with its surface thanks to the sensors of a hacked
Microsoft Kinect.
computing is tactile. Unveiled today, the inFORM is MIT's new scrying
pool for imagining the interfaces of tomorrow. Almost like a table of
living clay, the inFORM is a surface that three-dimensionally changes
shape, allowing users to not only interact with digital content in
meatspace, but even hold hands with a person hundreds of miles away. And
that's only the beginning.
Created by Daniel Leithinger and Sean
Follmer and overseen by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, the technology behind
the inFORM isn't that hard to understand. It's basically a fancy
Pinscreen, one of those executive desk toys that allows you to create a
rough 3-D model of an object by pressing it into a bed of flattened
pins. With inFORM, each of those "pins" is connected to a motor
controlled by a nearby laptop, which can not only move the pins to
render digital content physically, but can also register real-life
objects interacting with its surface thanks to the sensors of a hacked
Microsoft Kinect.
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technology