king talk

We reported more than a year ago about the cookie-sized, computerized tiles that can be stacked and shuffled in your hands called Siftables. Last year Siftables was a research project initiated at the MIT Media Lab. Since then they have all finished their graduate work, and last summer they formed a start-up company called Sifteo. With support from True Ventures and the National Science Foundation, they are now hard at work developing the next generation of the technology to bring their vision of Siftables to the world.

This year they’ll be creating games, reaching out to developers, working with manufacturers, and running beta tests with players. They look forward to continuing to get to know everyone, and to working with you to create the future of play. In addition to this you should follow the Sifteo blog, because this start up is going to be hot. They will be on sale this year… Watch out!

We reported about stiftables some weeks ago. This video shows more applications that can be used for the cookie-sized, computerized tiles that can be stacked and shuffled in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning? David Merrill is a grad student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. He and his fellow students in this group work on new technologies that give us more and better abilities to do things we want to do. His main interest now is the Siftables project, the subject of his TEDTalk, on which he works with Jeevan Kalanithi. In another field of inquiry, Merrill is looking at ways to access digital information in the wider world, when we are away from a traditional computer.

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For over 20 years researchers have been looking at ways to go beyond the mouse and keyboard to interact with computers. One of the most promising areas has been tangible user interfaces; physical objects directly coupled with digital information. These new interfaces have typically required expensive technologies and complex installation procedures, limiting them to the context of specialized research labs and museums.

Trackmate is an open source initiative to create an inexpensive, do-it-yourself tangible tracking system. The Trackmate Tracker allows any computer to recognize tagged objects and their corresponding position, rotation, and color information when placed on a surface. Trackmate sends all object data via LusidOSC (a protocol layer for unique spatial input devices), allowing any LusidOSC-based application to work with the system.

via IG Wiki Posts

Speaking of tangible interfaces for audio manipulation – Bug Labs recently released the BUGsound audio module! As with Siftables, BUG lets you connect various modules, but the BUG-approach is more for creating all sorts of gadgets, while Siftables are fully dedicated to music sampling.

Both are cool!

First impression: Why is that woman drawing a butt at 0:04?

Second impression: Alright, it’s a dog.

In Microsofts perspective, in the future everything will have a touch surface (even the air), we will be constantly tracked and augmented reality is the way to go. Nothing staggeringly new there, but it’s all nicely comped into a convenient package, which makes it a good overview over the current tech trends.

Here’s the official website and some more information (where you can also find a longer version of the video.

via Computerlove