At the MIT Media Lab, the Tangible Media Group has proved that the future of computing is connected with a sense of touch. Unveiled in mid-November, 2013, this new tech is a new scrying pool for those who wish to imagine the interfaces of the coming days.
Called as the inFORM by the developers, the new tech is a surface that changes shapes 3-dimensionally, allowing users to not only interact with the digital contents, but also hold hands with a person far away. And, that is only the beginning!
Created by Daniel Leithinger and Sean
Follmer and overseen by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, the technology behind
the inFORM isn't that hard to understand. It's basically a fancy
Pinscreen, one of those executive desk toys that allows you to create a
rough 3-D model of an object by pressing it into a bed of flattened
pins. With inFORM, each of those "pins" is connected to a motor
controlled by a nearby laptop, which can not only move the pins to
render digital content physically, but can also register real-life
objects interacting with its surface thanks to the sensors of a hacked
Microsoft Kinect.
