Amazing Technology Invented By MIT Tangible Media

At the MIT Media Lab, the Tangible Media Group believes the future of computing is tactile. Unveiled today, the inFORM is MIT s new scrying pool for imagining the interfaces of tomorrow. Almost like a table of living clay, the inFORM is a surface that threedimensionally changes shape, allowing users to not only interact with digital content in meatspace, but even hold hands with a person hundreds of miles away. And that s 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 3D 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 reallife objects interacting with its sur