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."

Comments

A lot less useless the Minority Report

[DrYak]

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.

How do you charge them?

[RevWaldo]

Hopefully you just dump 'em in a box and they inductively charge. Otherwise the demand for power squids is gonna go through the roof.

Uh-huh

[BigBlueOx]

I believe the first Replicators were built to be toys too.

Uh-huh