Tag Archives: Akimitsu Hogge

Reaching beyond the screen with the Tangible Media Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Researchers at MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Tangible Media Group are quite literally reaching beyond the screen with inFORM, their Dynamic Shape Display,

John Brownlee’s Nov. 12, 2013 article for Fast Company describes the project this way (Note: A link has been removed),

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.

To put it in the simplest terms, the inFORM is a self-aware computer monitor that doesn’t just display light, but shape as well. Remotely, two people Skyping could physically interact by playing catch, for example, or manipulating an object together, or even slapping high five from across the planet.

I found this bit in Brownlee’s article particularly interesting,

As the world increasingly embraces touch screens, the pullable knobs, twisting dials, and pushable buttons that defined the interfaces of the past have become digital ghosts. The tactile is gone and the Tangible Media Group sees that as a huge problem.

I echo what the researchers suggest about the loss of the tactile. Many years ago, when I worked in libraries, we digitized theĀ  card catalogues and it was, for me, the beginning of the end for my career in the world of libraries. To this day, I still miss the cards.(I suspect there’s a subtle relationship between tactile cues and memory.)

Research in libraries was a more physical pursuit then. Now, almost everything can be done with a computer screen; you need never leave your chair to research and retrieve your documents. Of course, there are some advantages to this world of screens; I can access documents in a way that would have been unthinkable in a world dominated by library card catalogues. Still, I am pleased to see work being done to reintegrate the tactile into our digitized world as I agree with the researchers who view this loss as a problem. It’s not just exercise that we’re missing with our current regime.

The researchers have produced a paper for a SIGCHI (Special Interest Group, Computer Human Interface; Association for Computing Machinery) conference but it appears to be unpublished and it is undated,

inFORM: Dynamic Physical Affordances and Constraints through Shape and Object Actuation by Sean Follmer, Daniel Leithinger, Alex Olwal, Akimitsu Hogge, andĀ  Hiroshi Ishi.

The researchers have made this paper freely available.