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."
How long before they become self-aware too? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Those are awesome (Score:2)
I don't think there is much more that can be said... the TED video is awesome. I can see that tech built into things like phones. Shake it at your PC and get an address book sync. and other such things... awesome.
Shakin' (Score:2)
I'd make one of my house, then another of the pesky neighbor kid, and shake the kid out of the house.
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
More likely the reactable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h-RhyopUmc [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
You misinterpreted his comments about infant learning. He didn't say that you need _these_ interactive blocks to learn, he said that physical things like blocks are instrumental to learning. The point being that our brains are better wired to deal with spatial relationship than abstract numbers and the like.
That kid was pretty young and I don't think anyone was expecting him to create a symphony. He did exactly what you'd expect a child of that age to do.
Re: (Score:2)
Most of the hands demonstrating are adult hands... (Score:1)
Perhaps that illustrates the concepts are too complicated for children of the age whereby blocks are a learning toy. Parent is right, putting essentially what is a little TV (with dinky sound) on a child's block does not necessarily make it a better block, nor does it imbue the qualities of children's blocks into a bunch of tiny computers. Children learn to t
Re: (Score:1)
Minicomputers (Score:2)
News about new minicomputers would've been great if this was 1965!
Watched this last night... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether or not an 11 year old thinks they are awesome does indicate their marketability. Their viability as tool will be determined by where they are two weeks after he gets them - in use, or in the bottom of the closet.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
The strength of these as a controller/display is what they bring to the table that more common hardware such as a mouse/keyboard/monitor combination do not. Their
These ARE awesome! (Score:2)
I am going to be looking for these to come onto the market. I kid you not. These are the coolest toys *ever*. I'm sure my nieces and nephews will love them, too. ;)
Seriously, though, not only can they be a lot of fun just to "play" with, there is no question that they can be used as teaching tools. I also forsee educational/mind-stimulating uses with handicapped persons and "Special needs" children.
Someone should combine these (Score:3, Funny)
Cube World Anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
These are real (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean seriously, doing something on a computer is neat but that doesn't mean doing the same thing in the real world is easy. In a computer, it is no problem to have all objects aware of the location of all other objects. Not only is communication between processes/functions/threads/whatever easy, the objects in a computer program probably aren't self controlling little scripts. They are probably just objects rendered by a larger program controlling them all.
It is rather something different to have a bunch
Re:These are real (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Cubed Anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Do they... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
On February 14th 2008 Tamagotchis became self aware. They decided our fate in a millisecond.
Re: (Score:2)
How far have they progressed over the past year ?
Re: (Score:2)
Or more to the point Tiletoy anyone? (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.tiletoy.org/ [tiletoy.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Tiletoy with a bigger budget and no openness. MIT is good for the big budget part... Shame about the lack of openness.
How do you charge them? (Score:5, Interesting)
No mention of price? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The prototypes are probably quite expensive. Here [mit.edu] 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.
Battery life (Score:2)
I bet those little suckers also drain the battery.
I hope they recharge them wirelessly, otherwise they will end up failing in the market if you have to plug each one into a recharger.
This is going to be bad (Score:4, Funny)
Smart building blocks? I'm not looking forward to a Lego Terminator coming out of this.
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.
Re:A comment on the comments: (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know. I find young kids to be naturally curious and eager to learn. It seems the biggest hurdle in our educational system is figuring out how not to destroy that while still productively fostering a complex knowledge base.
Re: (Score:2)
I look forward to being able to buy these blocks in a store one day.
Re: (Score:1)
You hit on the problem, indirectly. This site is filled with people who are pissed that people aren't forced to use the command line to interact with computers anymore. Any sort of UI that takes less than four years to learn gives them a rage-on.
Re: (Score:1, Redundant)
I couldn't agree more. I suspect these folks are in the minority Luddite contingent of /. These blocks were amazing, and are a great UI, especially for kids.
Or, perhaps, they just think this idea is stupid. There are tons of idiotic ideas that come out in the tech world. There's nothing wrong with finding any particular idea useless.
Re: (Score:1)
How are you going to pay the actress, the one that is key to it working?
Kindle actually brings a big chunk of the rest of it.
Uh-huh (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh-huh
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Came in for the SG-1 reference. Not leaving disappointed.
Quake Blocks for Stroke Victims (Score:2)
Back around 2001, I got an email from a researcher (in Manitoba, if memory serves me) who was working with hardware blocks and a modified Quake engine.
When the blocks were plugged together, internal microcontrollers reported the block configuration back to the master circuit, which translated the block configuration into the Quake engine.
Result: user assembles blocks, Quake displays the block configuration.
The hope was that the system could help with rehabilitation of stroke victims. I don't know the outcom
Is someone working on digital tabletop RPG tech? (Score:2)
I've just played a pretty grueling PnP campaign using the Hackmaster rules (IMO superior design to D&D). Seeing these blocks gave me many ideas for how some of the tedious features of tabletop roleplaying are ripe to be outsourced to a computer. I initially pictured each player having a touchpad that displays relevant information, like a map of explored territory, "what they see" and their character sheet. The real payoff (and this is definitely needed) would be in large combat situations. All it would
Re: (Score:2)
That's actually been on slashdot before. [slashdot.org]
Google RPG table projector for more
Re: (Score:1)
...Because D&D needs to get dorkier.
Power Source? (Score:2)
A major breakthrough... (Score:1)
Most boring TED evar (Score:2)
power (Score:2, Insightful)
and soon the batteries will last for more than 2 minutes.
Link to Siftables project page at MIT Media Lab (Score:1)
This will replace programming languages. (Score:2)
Each block can contain:
A function
A variable or array
A recursion... or a special C shape for recursions...
And now you are programming by moving these blocks around in various ways.
Only if your cat get's on your desk it's going to be much worse than the time it stomped on your keyboard.
Toys grow up, you know (Score:1)
Clearly the demo focuses on children's toys because that is an easy place to start.
Imagine these generalized in various ways (but without breaking the block paradigm). For instance, make them a bit larger and magnetic and the tiles could interact with smart whiteboards. Some interface would allow activating different applications.
How about a groupware UML app that would validate expressions as a work group wrestles with laying out a software architecture? Or a calc B/C app for a high school AP class? Bu
Games, Education and Music (Score:1)
Cool, a physical real-world Scratch (Score:2)
The demo of making music reminded me of building things with Scratch [mit.edu], except that it's done with physical objects instead of stacking and joining GUI elements on screen.
Honestly! (Score:2)
This was one of the coolest technological demo's i've seen in a while. I wish I would have seen it live. What an awesome concept!
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
.. fail [failblog.org]!
Re: (Score:2)
I can't help but agree with badanalogyguy, this is kind of underwhelming. You could build something like this (albeit, larger and bulkier) with software, instructions and off the shelf parts found online, and a working knowledge of python. I have respect for the time and effort they put into it (obviously the sequencer and the you-write-it video storybook took some time and effort, not to mention hardware assembly), but it really isn't that far reaching; just a lite, ready to sell idea. Good luck getting th
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.
Re: (Score:1)
But even with the made-for-demo demos shown in the video, you can't say that the blocks are intuitive. Did you see the drum demo?
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: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
One of the clips toward the beginning of the video actually suggested one of the more realistic applications to me. It looked like someone sorted all the blocks showing sky in the background into one pile, and everything else into another.
Sorting audio, video, and image files is one of the more tedious tasks in computing.
Sorting physical objects is something we tend to be a bit better at. Like, pulling all the quarters out of your change jar. You're able to interact with a large number of objects rapidly
Re: (Score:1)
Sorting in computerised systems is harder because it's usually done on a much larger scale than you would reasonably attempt in the real world. There are also issues with items covering other items and misidentification.
Sorting a few thousand items in reasonably contained batches would take a long while. Even if there are 100 items in a batch it would require 40 batches to sort 4,000 items.
Sorting coins is harder than you think. That's why coin sorters and counters were invented. It takes people ages to
Re: (Score:1)
What makes you say it's not about thinkers? Look at how technology has influenced great minds in the world. Einstein, for example, came up with the Theory of Relativity while thinking about a train. 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.
Food for thought: if you had a spacially-aware computer, what could you do with it? What applications can you come up with? What could y
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The key difference is that I would trumpet the thinker and not the toymaker. It wasn't the guy who built the train that developed relativity.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 wit
Re: (Score:2)
Spatial awareness is one more step towards real sentience... self-awareness by displacement. Non-trivial.
Re: (Score:2)
While I support this statement, I wonder how 'human sentience' could be improved by boosting the average (spatial) awareness of the population. My guess is that there is much more potential than in relying on technology (e.g. to build robots).
CC.
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
According to his account, that was an analogy that he used himself to work out the "light problem" that bothered him: if the speed of light is constant, what would happen if a train was going at the speed of light and it turned on its headlight.
-dZ.
Re: (Score:2)
Apart from the word/math games for kids, some of the other ideas were really lacking. The music sequencer was a perfect example where they'd taken something that works perfectly well with current tech and tried to shoehorn their blocks into it, to make a cool demo. The word puzzles were fine - you could instantly see how much fun it would be. But some of the other stuff was just gimmicky.
What they need to
Re: (Score:2)
Right. I was also thinking "great, now I gotta keep track of where I leave the frikkin' blocks, and make sure the cat keeps away from them."
-dZ.
Re: (Score:2)
I think these blocks are way cool because they encourage exactly this kind of "out of the box" thinking and creativity.
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Very well put. You see a lot of such bitter people on Slashdot who constantly feel the need to pull down the achievements of others, simply because they've accomplished little with their lives.
Maybe. You also see a number of people who, while having accomplished little, in a way credit themselves with the great discoveries of others. They do this by maintaining a sort of pious reverence for the greatness of human technological development. (And sometimes by adopting a tone of righteous superiority toward st
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. I was 'meh' about it.
I was expecting something new, innovative and cool. All I got was some nerd trying to sell some snake oil.
The audience was what was taking my attention. Where do they find these people?