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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 for one welcome our modular overlords.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
I subscribe to the TED channel in Miro, and it so happens that I watched this last night with my 11-year old son. I was impressed, but for me a better indicator of a product's viability is how my son perceives the product. He thought they were awesome.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
With Self Replicating Robots. Skynet's soldiers will need to be able to know their proximity to one another.
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How is this different than Cube World?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
But still, these blocks are a lot less useless than Oblong's display or Microsoft's surface. (Which none the less were largely touted technologies) Because :
- The blocks stay on the table. You won't need a gorilla arm to operate them, unlike the Oblong's "spatial operated environment" which require you to stand upright and hold your hands in front of you.
- The display is on a screen in front of the user, thus the user is looking naturally straigh ahead. No need to bend the neck of a table like with MS' surface.
- The block provide tactile feed back as they are physical object, making the user aware of how the software might interpret the movements. (unlike Oblong's SOE - Which might interpret unrelated movement of the users' hand as command-gestures)
- And they are an improvement over MIT's previous inductance-based tokens, as they have mini display helping the user understand better what he's doing.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Hopefully you just dump 'em in a box and they inductively charge. Otherwise the demand for power squids is gonna go through the roof.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
They must cost way too much for the price to not be mentioned.
Smart building blocks? I'm not looking forward to a Lego Terminator coming out of this.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
No, but if you leave two of them next to each other, the following morning they will have stacked on top of each other, and then miraculously after 9 months, a smaller third block will appear from nowhere, that seems to do nothing but emit an annoying shrieking sound and leak battery acid.
I believe the first Replicators were built to be toys too.
Uh-huh
But it was the guy who invented the train that enabled the thinker to think.
All the world is connected. Einstein came up with this Relativity while thinking about a train. So the inventor of the train, the guys who built the train that Einstein thought about, the train's engineer, and all the people on the train all contributed to Einstein's original thought. Einstein's parents were responsible for his upbringing. Einstein's teachers influenced his thinking.
My point is that while the thinker came up with the thought, he did not do so alone. Isaac Newton noted about science that we stand on the shoulders of giants. That refers not just to previous thinkers, but to all of human experience.
Don't be so quick to dismiss things out of hand. A spatially-aware cube is and important building block of other things and is certainly a technological marvel to behold in and of itself.
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I was thinking along the same lines.
They'd probably be excellent for teaching children to read and write. Just combine it with software that reads or tries to read the words the child spells by combining the letters. The child could be given a specific set of letters and rewarded by how many words they can spell correctly using the set. Or you could have the program pronounce words and the child then reproduces the word with the blocks.
Granted these are all things you could do with a computer now, but this obviously allows for easier manipulation by the child and is more intuitive than using a keyboard. Not to mention it might be indistinguishable from a game in the childs eyes. And getting kids to enjoy and actively seek out learning is probably the biggest hurdle in our educational system.
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
Shake it at your PC and get an address book sync. and other such things... awesome.
Perhaps I have a healthy dose of skepticism of virtually anything that comes from the MIT Media lab, but I don't find this even remotely desirable. And have you noticed that the iPhone for two product generations has had the capability to utilize motion for gestures, and hasn't?
Also, notice what the little kid does with it, after watching other people play with it. The kid saw that they could change, make noise, etc. And what does he do?
He stacks them like regular building blocks. Completely treating them as just pure, inanimate physical objects, despite having it extensively demonstrated to him that they can be interacted with. Which pretty much shoots to hell Merrill's high-falutin' speech about...gah, it was so buzzword-laden, I can't even remember. Something about how we need these interactive blocks to learn?
Oh yes, and the sound/music thing was a direct ripoff of something that did exactly the same thing on a multi-touch table, about a year or two ago, recognizing shapes placed on the table and how they were manipulated.
This seems like a great possibility for adult-level gaming (nobody's going to buy something this expensive just for their kids), but nothing more.
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