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.
Interested ....
