Check out this video. It’s a concept video that ETC students produced to demonstrate applications for Dynamic Physical Rendering, an Intel-funded research effort to develop ‘programmable matter’, technology for creating self-constructing 3D objects on the fly.Watching the video, I imagine the car designers offing themselves in their garages after their work is literally squashed and warped at the whim of a CEO. Regardless, assuming that something like this will become viable in the coming decades, I am interested to see the ’software’ interface that enables you to reshape a 3D model by manipulating a physical object itself. When the corporate flunkie in the video tucks and shapes the car, how are they controlling what points on the model they are manipulating, or what tool they are using? Will a second input device be needed, or can the ‘claytronics’ hardware shape and color itself into a ‘hard’ software UI?

From an Interaction Design angle, this seems like the hardware analogue to Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Interaction Research at MRL and other research at MIT’s Tangible Media Group and that the marriage of multi-touch and gestural interaction methods with dynamic physical rendering will open up stunning new methods of creating and shaping physical objects with human hands.

In the meantime, I wonder whether we aren’t better off just teaching people how to sculpt rather than creating advanced tools that do essentially the same thing?

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