MIT Creates an Interactive 3D Shapeshifting Display Controlled by Your Physical Movement

While we’ve been able to communicate with each other visually through our phones and services like Skype, this new technology looks to take reaching out and touching someone to an entirely new form. Developed by MIT’s Tangible Media Group, inForm is a dynamic shape displayer that can render 3D content physically. It allows users to physically interact with digital information and other people even great distances away.

The platform can create novel interaction possibilities through the variable stiffness rendering and physical output seen through direct touch and other hands-on actions. While this demonstration is a pretty early stage design with a low resolution of 30X30 resulting in 900 moving output pixels, advances could quickly lead to a number of new visualization technologies applicable to gaming, medicine and other interactive use cases.

The Tangible Media Group said about the project:

This work is towards our vision of Radical Atoms, where we can manipulate the physical world as easily as pixels on a screen.”

via Colossal