Hasta La Gadget!

Just five months ago, MIT’s Tangible Media Group was showing off a physical interface that mimics you in real time. This week in Milan, the team unveiled the next iteration of the system that’s much larger and even more sophisticated. You’re going to want to click through for the videos.

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Us humans do rely on touch a whole lot, as it happens to be one of our most primal senses, offering a method to tangibly interact and receive data concerning our surroundings. Over the past few years, many digital touchscreens have made their way into everyday devices, allowing us to use touch as a form of input in a range of ways, although it remains rather limited when it comes to actual interaction with our environment. To make sure that there is some semblance of the tactile, MIT Media Lab researchers have come up with a 3D, shapeshifting surface that they call the inFORM.

inFORM would enable users to execute common physical interactions with digital matter, now how about that? There is plenty of potential with this unique surface, ranging from holding a person’s hand with the subject being thousands of miles away from you, or to bring a 3D model to life. It does resemble that unique bed of pins that was recently seen in The Wolverine, and also part of Krypton’s technology that Russell Crowe loved to make use of in Man of Steel. inFORM will rely on a connected pinscreen alongside a hacked Microsoft Kinect and a laptop to get the job done, letting you alter and adjust the model using your bare hands. [inFORM Project Page]

inFORM 3D Shapeshifting Surface original content from Ubergizmo.