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How Your Coffee Table Could Pass Your Coffee
mikejuk writes with this tantalizing excerpt about one possible future of furniture:"The mechanism of MIT's new shapeshifting output device is remarkably simple. It is based on the well known pin screen devices that you can use to take a 3D impression of an object. A 2D plate of pins can be moved to create a surface.In the same way, inForm uses a set of rods and actuators to create dynamic surfaces. The big difference is that the actuators are under computer control. Now you have a computer controlled surface and what is really surprising is how much you can get from this simple idea. With the help of a 3D depth camera and some innovative software, the surface can act as an output device that lets you manipulate real objects remotely. If you use the surface as a table then your computer can bring you real objects such as your mobile phone — see the video to believe it. While there are many obvious serious applications such as displaying volumetric CT scans, displaying complex data or providing early experience of prototypes there is also the possibility of having fun with the device. After all simple pinscreens are still sold as executive toys. Could there be a new generation of games in this?"
Pass coffee?? I can do that all by myself, thank you.
Rene Auberjenois wants a word with you guys, something about prior art.
Why not one or more (for speed) moving lines of actuators. I guess there is some trick (magnetic field, whatever) to temporarily unlock a row of pins, then move further.
If you actually tried to use this to "pass your coffee" it would almost certainly spill it.
(captcha: "befoul." Even the captcha-generator is smarter than the submitter.)
The ability to punch somebody over the Internet.
No more asking that bitch to pass me the salt!
I've seen this piece of junk all over the internet lately. It has approximately 0 uses in the real world.
Like all technology, we won't know that it's viable until they make porn with it.
So we can all have our own Starbucks. Plus an audio track with three baristas chatting about movies they just saw or want to see, while customers are waiting in line.
There are lots of applications for blind people. Think about it!
They would not be limited to just Braile.
Of course the resolution needs to improve.
Would someone with better imagination than mine think of specific products?
That is cool. But at the same time it is also the most lame way I could imagine to move stuff around.
All the examples they show could be done better with a robot hand or two, with a FAR smaller number of actuators.
Software that detects the position of each finger already exists.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
How Your Coffee Table Could Pass Your Coffee
Thanks but no thanks, I pass my coffee quite nicely on my own; usually about a half hour or so after I've drunk it.
The Singularity is here. Immortality here we come!
..sue MIT
What's so impressive about this isn't in the summary. The cool part is that they developers have already considered (and built prototypes) of all kinds of interactive models that this could support. Remote control, tactile user interfaces, light and color manipulation, soooo much more than "bring me my phone".
The video blows the summary out of the water.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I was going to use the subject, Sort My Legos, but the prototype resolution is too low. With more actuators, you could dump Lego bricks on the table and have it sort them for you. Or for the more practical minded, sort wrenches, nuts and bolts.
This isn't really anything new. Here's another example of similar technology by Festo used in materials handling/sorting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVUx_0VN5PQ
So obvious. It even looks like stop-motion video.
Drop NoScript on the first few, then a dozen more come up. I won't use that kind of site. Here's a better link.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What happens to this surface when you spill your coffee on it? Even if it is made to not be damaged by such an event, it sounds like this table would be a b*tchh to clean.
I feel your anger towards 'internet hype' in general but I gotta be honest I thought this was cool.
'coffee table that can pass your drink' is a contextualization of the technology for a sort of 'pop-science' audience...looking at the tech I think it has legs.
I make tshirts (and do tech consulting)...my goal is to produce tshirts from US grown hemp...I can def imagine an application of this technology at a few key spots in the production process. Probably somethign to do with sorting.
it's just one dumb article...but IMHO it's cool
Thank you Dave Raggett
This idea has come around many times. Howard Hughes, when he was recovering from an accident, had a bed custom-made for him with many foam pads on screw jacks. (This was the inspiration for the CGI version of such a bed in the Wolverine movie.) The Festo Wave surface is a nice implementation, especially because it's composed of a large number of identical units that latch together and make electrical and pneumatic connections.
Back in the 1970s, there was a 3D plotter which had an X-Y positioner and a big spool of stiff wire, which it would push through a sheet of wallboard to the desired height and cut off. Because all the machinery was under the table, it looked impressive, as 3D graphs made of many thin wires appeared above the table.
There's another way to move objects around on a surface. If you have a flat plate which can be vibrated in X, Y, and rotation, you can move objects around on it. If you vibrate something with a sawtooth wave, during the slow part of the ramp, you move objects by static friction. But during the steep return part of the ramp, you accelerate the plate fast enough to get out of the static friction region, so the object slips slightly.
But you can do more. By combining rotational and linear vibration, you can affect some objects more than others. For pure rotational vibration, objects near the center of rotation aren't affected. By appropriate combinations of rotational and translational vibration, multiple objects can be moved around independently. There was a demo of this as a robot chessboard about ten years ago. UPS was interested in it for box sorting, but it didn't work out with mixed real-world boxes.
One word: Tablejob.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't see any possible "new generation of games" based upon passing me my coffee cup.
At least not as long as I'm still able to reach over and pick it up myself.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Are you kidding? Maybe not as a table, but I would *love* to have a living room floor made out of this stuff. Furniture that forms and dissipates on command, how cool would that be? Not to mention I bet it could make a pretty awesome massage chair.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.