Skype me a high five with it

November 15, 2013 4:07 PM

Check out this rad MIT pin grid gizmo.
posted by rollick (21 comments total)

Long distance relationships will never be the same.
posted by Lutoslawski at 4:13 PM on November 15, 2013 [5 favorites]

Pretty cool. Kind of niche since it only works on things that can be represented as a height field... but pretty cool. I wonder how fragile it is.

Why not put rgb LEDs on the top of the "pixels"? Your hands would stop getting in the way of the projector.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:21 PM on November 15, 2013

Came for some form of Rule 34 inference, got it in 1.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:26 PM on November 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

At a siggraph several years ago someone was showing a remote rotating cylinder. About the size of a small rolling pin, there were two of them, turn one the other turned the same amount. If your friend added resistance to the remote, you'd feel the resistance. Very spooky, but very natural and real. The key was that it was all analog and had zero latency. You could see exactly the same motion across the room. The remote and interactive devices will only take off when the latency is managed and reduced to below perception, until then anything like this will die in the uncanny valley. But very cool, looks like a Media Lab project.
posted by sammyo at 4:30 PM on November 15, 2013

This is really going to enhance our remote ball-rolling teleconferences
posted by thelonius at 4:32 PM on November 15, 2013 [22 favorites]

The dream of slapping people over the Internet comes ever closer to reality.
posted by MrBadExample at 4:33 PM on November 15, 2013 [14 favorites]

Love the sound and the idea to project onto the surface.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 4:35 PM on November 15, 2013

See, I told you guys the Kinect was good for something! Just imagine COD with Teleslap technology.
posted by Ad hominem at 4:36 PM on November 15, 2013

Bar charts! It's businessy!
posted by Artw at 4:41 PM on November 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Make the pins smaller to give higher resolution, add some way to layer fiberglass/carbon fiber/spray foam you got a whole new rapid prototyping technology.
posted by Ad hominem at 4:45 PM on November 15, 2013

Hey, that's brilliant. By MIT Media Lab students Daniel Leithinger and Sean Follmer, with Professor Hiroshi Ishii. Project home page.
posted by Nelson at 4:55 PM on November 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

So cool!
posted by latkes at 5:08 PM on November 15, 2013

I want a really big one with a hex grid for an interactive tabletop RPG map.
posted by jason_steakums at 5:16 PM on November 15, 2013 [5 favorites]

A variable-elevation hex grid display would actually be even more ideal for a game like Heroscape. No more snapping tiles together!
posted by Strange Interlude at 5:41 PM on November 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

It's gotta suck replacing a dead "pixel" in the middle there.
posted by maryr at 5:59 PM on November 15, 2013

On a more serious note, is there anything more awesome than the MIT media lab?
posted by Lutoslawski at 6:19 PM on November 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Most of the rest of MIT, actually.
posted by maryr at 7:09 PM on November 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

the future is going to be terrible.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 8:34 PM on November 15, 2013

Make the pins smaller to give higher resolution, add some way to layer fiberglass/carbon fiber/spray foam you got a whole new rapid prototyping technology.

Paging Dr. Westlake, Dr. Peyton Westlake.
posted by MrBadExample at 9:44 PM on November 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

This 3d bar chart demonstrates that, altought I know zilch about the underlying meaning or methods through which the numbers were computed, I damn well can afford me a MIT undergrad as temp!
posted by elpapacito at 6:50 AM on November 16, 2013

Sammyo - those cylinders were probably synchros or selsyns - a kind of combination transformer/motor where a pair, if wired together, will shadow each other's movements. Been around for a hundred years or so but still very cool. I salvaged a pair from an old Royal Navy battleship radar (long story, involves sheds), and used them as an antenna rotator/pointer.
posted by Devonian at 4:06 AM on November 18, 2013