Hannah Emmanuele
The internet already has helped reshape society and upended entire industries. What’s next? When technology experts say”the pace of change is accelerating,” it’s sometimes hard to imagine what is yet to come, but the technology evolution is only in its infancy. Here’s a taste from Konrad Krawcyk in Digital Times:
Like something out of Back to the Future or TRON, the inFORM can also react to the world around it, as well as be used like an input device akin to a mouse or keyboard. The inFORM can be used for everything from physically rendering bar graphs and 3D models which you can touch like you would any other object. And forget Skype calls; the inFORM can create a physical version of someone who, for example, rings into a conference call from afar. The inFORM was developed by MIT PhD students Sean Follmer, Daniel Leithinger, and Professor Hiroshi Ishii, from MIT’s Tangible Media Group.
The inFORM’s possible applications go way beyond making your conference calls a more futuristic experience though. Think of what being able to render objects in 3D can do for such fields like architecture, urban planning, engineering and the like. Follmer says that having the ability to render an object in 3D physically allows you to “better understand it.”
