Quite a few years ago when still in college, I read a book “When things start to think” by the Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Media Lab. It was one of the reason i always had this dream to someday be at the Media Labs and work on some the cool culture and technology intersection related stuff.
So this book introduced me back then to the concept of E Inks. Now part of various devices and particularly made famous by Amazon’s Kindle, the e ink eventually as a technology aimed to become printable on surfaces as thin as the newspapers.
Today FastCompany published an article that talks about T Shirts that will allow for E Ink printing, thus giving a huge avenue to advertisers to use people t shirts as a dynamic display medium. The possibilities that something like this brings about are enormous like maybe even cell phones could eventually get integrated into clothing.
Check out the interesting prospect of E Ink on cloth:
Thinking about the future of display and image projection has always been a fascinating exercise.
Just a day ago, we had written about the Gestural Interfaces from Minority Report which talked about the concepts of real world pixels and recombinant networks. Now Wired magazine published a article about another interesting research which is trying to use swarms of micro-helicopters to create a giant 3-D display. This project called Fly Fire is part of an ongoing project at the MIT SENSEable city lab.
This is exciting, personally for me, as I was discussing this concept with a friend a few days ago, only that we were thinking about nano-bots (which meant we had to wait for nano technology to reach that level) instead of the micro helicopters.
Ultimately this project is a step towards making smart dust, the idea of extremely small computing devices that are self contained and ubiquitous.
The movie Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise) presented new methods of interactions with information. Looked very sci-fi back then, but not any more. Oblong Industries is working towards making the concept a reality.
John Underkoffler (co-founder of the company and lead of the team that created the Minority Report interfaces) recently demonstrated the interface at a TED conference.
The product is called the g-speak spatial operating environment.
As the name suggest its an Operating System that handles interactions in space. It is a combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels. I have tried to put some brief explanation about these 3 concepts below the video.
