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Demo of Spatially Aware Blocks
Chris Anderson writes "This 5-min demo just posted from last week's TED — got a big crowd reaction. It's a new technology coming out of MIT, about to be commercialized. Siftables have been seen before, but not like this. They're toy blocks/tiles that are spatially aware and interact with each other in very cool ways. Initial use may be as toys, but there's big potential for new paradigm of spatially-aware physical mini computers."
i think this is a prototype, so it may be in the range of 70-300k for that first set. The price may come down once they start producing more.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
The Cube World stuff he linked to is a series of children's toys. They are physical blocks with little stick figure people in them. If you put them together they recognize the connection and react. You can also do things like tilt them to interact with the stick figure people.
The Siftables at TED are much more capable and more powerful. But there are at least some basic elements that are almost identical to the CubeWorld toys.
One of my younger cousins has these. She loves them.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
The prototypes are probably quite expensive. Here is a more technical description of the system. I think you can find most of this stuff in ~50$ cellphones, and they even have an antenna. I don't think why this should cost more than ~30$ a piece.
>> What if there had been no trains? Maybe Einstein would never have came up with his theories of General and Special Relativity and physics would be a lot less rich for it.
WTF? He probably would have thought of bicycles with mounted headlights.
His theory had less to do with the technology of the train than with the relative speed of (fast) moving objects. If not trains or bicycles, perhaps baseballs or horses.
I agree that these blocks seem like much ado about nothing.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Bah. It's just Cubed v2.0