Looking Out.: Ayo, Sept. 9th

Morphees: Shape-Changing Mobile Devices

Creators: Anne Roudaut, Abhijit Karnik, Markus Lochtefeld, Sriram Subramanian (Bristol Interaction and Graphics).
Link:: Morphees
Fields: HCI, Shape-Changing Mobile Devices, Technology
Description: Morphees are self-actuated flexible mobile devices that adapt their shapes on their own to the context of use in order to offer better affordances.
Technology: Dielectric Electro Active Polymers, Shape Memory Alloys (SMA), Geometric Shape Resolution (Non-Uniform Rational B-splines)

Thoughts:

• I love technologies that blur the line between physical and digital. The Morphees concept is a novel take on the idea of painting digital pixels in the physical world. The idea, postulating and experimenting with what properties and physical shape these dixels (digital pixels)? would take upon crossover to the physical world opens up new avenues for human-computer interaction and a generally rich, bright future.

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REVEL: Tactile Feedback Technology for Augmented Reality

Creators: Olivier Bau, Ivan Poupyrev (Disney Research, Pittsburgh).
Link:: Revel
Fields: Augmented Reality, Haptics, Tactile Displays, Tangible Interfaces, Touch Interactions
Description: REVEL is an augmented reality (AR) tactile technology that allows for change to the tactile feeling of real objects by augmenting them with virtual tactile textures using a device worn by the user.
Technology: Reverse Electrovibration

Thoughts:

• If there ever was a missing link to connect humans with the computers they possess, I believe this would be it. The technology seamlessly allows the blending of physical and digital worlds - now grasping and other natural human gestures would actually mean something. Magical!
• I believe this illustrates the future of computing and would love to see the numerous applications that are sure to spawn from this technology.