A couple weeks ago I saw this very cool short TED video about Siftables, a project coming out of the MIT Media Lab and Taco Lab in San Francisco. So, for my first ETech session this morning, I’m checking out Cookie Scale Computing with Jeevan Kalanithi and David Merrill. The brief program description is:
Cookie Scale Computing: Human-Computer Interfaces as Piles of Gesture Sensitive Displays
David Merrill (MIT Media Lab) et alWe’ve built a new type of interface that brings computation into our physical and gestural world: a set of cookie-sized, gesturally aware, neighbor detecting wireless displays that act together as one interface. We call them Siftables. People live in and know about the physical world. Computers should too.
Siftables are cookie-sized computers that are interactive, show graphics and can be manipulated physically in interesting ways – they can sense their neighbors and communicate wirelessly. They work together to form a single interface.
They demonstrated a bunch of interesting uses – check out the website and the TED video for examples and numerous news stories.