(^136) | dEsiGninG for EMErGinG tECHnoLoGiEs
Farther Out, a Malleable Future
In the opening scenes of the Superman movie Man of Steel, one of
the many pieces of Kryptonian technology we see are communica-
tion devices whose form and shape is constantly reshaping—a tangi-
ble, monochromatic hologram, if you will. Imagine thousands of tiny
metal beads moving and reshaping as needed. Even though this makes
for a nice bit of sci-fi eye candy, it’s also technology that MIT’s Tangible
Media Group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, is currently exploring. In
their own words, this work “explores the ‘Tangible Bits’ vision to seam-
lessly couple the dual world of bits and atoms by giving physical form
to digital information.” They are creating objects (the “tangible bits”)
that can change shape!
Even though the team’s vision of “radical atoms” is still in the realm
of the hypothetical, the steps they are taking to get there are no less
inspiring. Their latest example of tangible bits is a table that can render
3 D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in
a tangible way. In their video demonstration, a remote participant in a
video conference moves his hands, and in doing so reshapes the surface
of a table, rolling a ball around. The technology is at once both awe-in-
spiring and crude; the wooden pegs moving up and down to define
form aren’t that unlike the pin art toys we see marketed to children.
Having said that, it’s easy to imagine something like this improving
in fidelity over time, in the same way that the early days of monochro-
matic 8 -bit pixels gave way to retina displays and photorealistic images.
I mention this example because it’s easy to diminish the value of tan-
gible interactions when compared to mutability of pixels behind glass;
a single device such as a smartphone or tablet can become so many
things, if only at the cost of tangibility. Our current thinking says,
“Why create more ‘stuff’ that only serves a single purpose?” And this
makes sense. I recall the first app for musicians that I downloaded
to my iPhone—a simple metronome. For a few dollars, I was able to
download the virtual equivalent of an otherwise very expensive piece of
hardware. It dawned on me: if indeed the internal electronics are com-
parable to those contained in the hardware, there will be a lot of compa-
nies threatened by this disruption. This ability to download for free an
app that as an object would have cost much more (not to mention add
clutter) is a great shift for society.
nandana
(Nandana)
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