A Group Of Scientists Create Shapeshifting Furniture That Can Transform With A Gesture
Soon, your bedroom wall might ripple seamlessly from flush to shelves, your dining room table might shuffle into a workspace at the flick of your wrist.
By Sadho Ram — 13 Apr 2014, 12:16 PM — Updated over 10 years ago
Last Year, MIT's Tangible Media Group Unveiled The inFORM, A Digital Project That Could Let The User Interact With Physical Objects Remotely
MIT Has Now Followed The Project Up With 'Transform', Which Takes The inFORM Concept And Uses It To Make Transformable Furniture
The Transform table made its debut at the Lexus Design Amazing exhibition in Milan. It employs three "Dynamic Shape Displays" that collectively move 1,000 pins that respond to gestures in real-time. The display can undulate in wave forms, and is designed to remind the owner of water or sand.
With Transform, The Tangible Media Group Wanted To Explore What The Shapeshifting Furniture Of Tomorrow Might Be Like
What if the design of your furniture weren't static, but could change according to your nature, your personality, and more? Imagine a chair that could transform from an upright rocker to a sumptuous lounge, just by detecting your mood.
theverge.com
The Transform Changes Shape Depending Upon How Users Interact With It And Can Also Metamorphosize Itself To Influence The Emotions Of The People Around It
What The Tangible Media Lab Is Trying To Prove With Transform Is That There Are More To Shapeshifting Interfaces Than Just Shaking Hands Over Skype
Using a library of animations created by Philipp Schoessler, the surface of the Transform ripples, boils, turns into a school of abstract creatures, and even uses form and motion to sing a sort of geometric lullaby to calm people who interact with it.
gizmodo.com
The future of interface design is that we'll be able to interface with everything, and the line between what we call a computer and what we don't will eventually go away entirely. Tomorrow's computers will be furniture, clothing, and more, and the ways we interact with them--and they with us--will be richer than we can possibly imagine.
emag.co.uk
As For What's Next For The Tangible Media Group, Follmer Discusses That They Hope It's No Coincidence That They've Been Hosted In Milan This Year By Lexus, An Automobile Maker
" "Imagine a car with a shapeshifting dashboard!" he says. No need to imagine for long, though: next time we hear from these guys, we suspect they'll have already tried to build one for themselves. " reports The Fast Company.
A Little Background On The Tangible Media Group:
Led by professor Hiroshi Ishii, the team explores how digital interfaces—basically, every UI we've experienced up until now—can be transformed by physical bits. A big part of that mission is developing materials that can change and shift along with the user. For example, some students are working on pneumatic interfaces that react to stimulation by unrolling or retracting.
gizmodo.com