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Smart 'Lego' Set Conjures Up Virtual 3D Twin
philetus writes "New Scientist has up a story on Posey, a hub-and-strut construction kit that senses its configuration and communicates it wirelessly to a computer. From the article: 'If you gave Lego brains, you might get something like Posey, a new hands-on way of interacting with computers developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, US. When Posey's plastic pieces are snapped together, an exact copy of the construction appears on a computer screen. Every twist of, say, a stick figure's arm is mirrored in 3D modelling software ... Each piece's plastic shell is stuffed with chips and devices for processing these signals. They are sent wirelessly to a computer using a low-power protocol called ZigBee. This means, bending Posey's pieces can make objects on-screen respond in real time. Right now, each custom-made piece has about US$50 (£25) worth of parts, Weller estimates. But if mass produced, it could be much cheaper.'"
Next they need to integrate this into a FPS or something so that we can have 'live' fights.
that the ASCII goatse guy doesn't get hold of a set of these.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Are batteries included? I mean, I know it's a low power protocol, but how long is the power source in this going to last, and is it replaceable?
This little toy's neat, and no mistake--but if you can only use it for, say, 50 hours total and then it loses half its function, then what's the point?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Finally the blind can now see what they are building!
oh wait...
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It seems to me that doing this with actual lego blocks should be much simpler. If each bump on the blocks had a small contact point with the ability to identify what it was connected to, the blocks could daisy chain the information to a computer, which could easily construct a full model of the blocks if it knew how each block was connected to its neighbor. Very cool idea though, kudos to the makers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zigbee
Dollars AND pounds? From an article referring to an American university? How cosmopolitan!
You can read about it in the tech report. Although this system was not modifiable in real-time like the one in the article (older hardware), the model of the smart "lego-like" bricks was automatically slurped into Quake 2 and much FPS fun was had.
Can't read ARTICLE title on firefox 1.5 or 2.0 due to color of text/ Is that a feature
/* l'Intellect, Stupide ! " */
When I was little, I had simple Legos to play with. I became a nerd. If I give my kids this kind of stuff... what will they become? Super-nerds who'll take over the work with their Battle-Poseys?
replicators
Lego has brains, called Mindstorms. I'd love to see a Mindstorms app that uses a camera to examine itself, then replicate itself by grabbing from a box of Lego (Mindstorms) and snapping its twin together.
Then watch as it builds an army. Which attacks a toystore and builds a bigger army. Which fights another self-assembling army, wins, and cannibalizes the enemy to rebuild its own wounded ranks to double size. And they build two friends. And so on.
Legoworld reduced to a chunky Grey Goo.
--
make install -not war
all this expensive tech used in toys for kids
...when it works both ways and changes made to the virtual model are duplicated on the physical one. That would be excellent.
Whilst I Have not found a way to get rid of it, you can alter the way it interactst with the page.
If you click the little [ / ] icon in the top right of the floating box (same position as close window X) then it switches between the 3 versions:
Left hand float
Across the top floating
Inline between article and comments (basically the original position)
liqbase
In soviet Russia, legos build you.
If you gave Lego brains, you might get something like Posey This almost sounds like a diss of Lego, and if it is, I'm going to have to ask them to step outside.
It would be smart to write it in such a way, that you could choose your operating system. We wouldn't want to be locked into one particular vendor's software, now would we. That would kind of fly in the face of an Open, Free, and Fair market system.
This sounds like it would be great for 3D animators, either as live performance (ala Elmo's World) or as a virtual stop-motion rig. The only thing that would be better is if there was some way for the pose to be communicated not only from the device to the computer but also from the computer to the device. This would let stop-motion artists do key-framing and in-betweens, which are currently difficult in the real world.
:)
In the mid-90's, there was an existing animator's rig that did much the same thing as this, marketed as the Monkey (SIGGRAPH paper). It was apparently reconfigurable to different body configurations, but probably not as easily as the CMU device. Like the CMU device, it, too, had a one-way communication path from the device to the computer. It's currently discontinued, which suggests that CMU had better work hard on bringing down the price.
This thing is nothing like a Lego set. It's not even like Tinkertoys, or K'NEX. It's just a motion capture puppet. Even if it was like Lego, what would be the point? Why is this be any better than taking a picture of what you made?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
But does the modeling software run on Linux? Is it at least open source?
'Cuz somehow I _strongly_ suspect that it does/is not. This would be far from the first way cool geek toy whose software interface is 'Bloze/closed source ONLY. I mean, HOW ARE WE TO INSTRUCT THE YOUNGLINGS in The One True Way when _all_ the toyz are pwned by the Evil Empire?
My friend and supervisor has a five-year-old. He's growing up in a world dominated by a proprietary software monopoly. He has a PSP, but no Software Development Kit for it. I ask you, is that right?
</rantmode>
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
there is a video of posey being demoed at a dorkbot pittsburgh meeting here: http://www.allartburns.org/dorkbot/dorkbot-200704-weller.mp4
Zigbee can hold up to 255 devices arranged in its "network id". How do they use more than 255 "lego" blocks? it isn't much smarter to use rfid directly? .
Anyway, I really don't think zigbee in this particular case is such a smart idea considering the scalability sorrounded to it.... Except for demonstrative purposes.
In addition to selling ZigBee chips, Microchip also supports an even simpler protocol called MiWi. I have looked into using this for my around-the-house electronics projects, but a board with MiWi and all of the components (caps, resistors, etc) costs around $30 bucks from Microchip. This could get expensive if you plan on using this to control many lights, a/c, etc around the house. The chips are actually cheap (around $2), but when you want all of the circuitry that make the chips work on a PCB, it gets more expensive. I just want something that I can pretty much send and receive data to/from without having to do all of that soldering. Does anyone know of some cheaper options?
I can't wait to see how this affects my software design analogies. :)
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Someone needs to call the Asgard. ...wait...they're dead... Someone needs to call SG-1
GE/S/P a- e++ y-- r-- s:++ d+ h! X+++ t++ C+ P+ L++ E W++ w M-- V? PS+ P+
Take off every Zig!
How is this news? We put a bloke on the moon 30 odd years back, we can get 12TB+ of data onto a 1" cube. This isn't even slightly revolutionary.
Its glorified lego.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
You can move the blocks on the computer and have the real blocks assemble themselves to match.
Besides, legos are expensive enough without stuffing them full of electronics.
Now if they could export the 'puppet show' out to a bvh file that would be awesome.
This is how it all starts...soon the smart lego blocks are assembling themselves, then before you know it, they're dismantling the planet to make more....
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
Well, at least it's cheaper than Lego... ;-)
The motors wouldn't have to be calibrated, the controller software could compare positions and adjust until the stick-figure's position matched that of the computer model.
Hmm. That could be a really creepy toy. Especially if you had two of them linked over the net. I bend Sticky's arms here, and somewhere in a room half a planet away, Sticky's twin comes aliiive ...
Eric Baird
"...Right now, each custom-made piece has about US$50 (£25) worth of parts..."
So, priced about the same as Lego then?
-Styopa