Demo of Spatially Aware Blocks 109
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."
Cube World Anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot less useless the Minority Report (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Or more to the point Tiletoy anyone? (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.tiletoy.org/ [tiletoy.org]
How do you charge them? (Score:5, Interesting)
A comment on the comments: (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a amazing education tool (not an education toy) I would buy a set for my godson in a flash.
I just hope that Moore's law brings us 'The Young Lady's Illustrated Primmer' by the time I start a family.
Uh-huh (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh-huh
Sony did in 2001 (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's [sonycsl.co.jp] something very simmilar from sony in 2001.
the sony one used a surface to contain the video, whereas the siftables have their own screen and apparently contain tilt and motion sensors not just position on the surface screen. hence they have a lot more gestures. But Sony had the basic idea working.
Re:Amazing (Score:3, Interesting)
There is another argument about sentience and spatial awareness, as many with autistic spectral disorders lack personal displacement awareness. Understanding spacial relativity helps humans, who largely understand this, design objects with this 'sense', and can therefore increase the probability that object interaction can be predictable, and therefore collisions and undesired actions preventable.
why? And, did anyone else notice what the kid did? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.