Future objects

I’ve noticed that research into mixed reality — the attempt to bring digital objects fully into our physical world — falls into two essentially disparate camps: Making use of physical objects that move in real time, and creating objects with 3D printers.

Today’s 3D printers can create incredibly intricate 3D forms, but for technical reasons are extremely slow. It can take hours for such a printer to produce an object of any significant size. In contrast, there are wonderful, if much coarser, interactive displays like inFORM by Hiroshi Ishii and his students at MIT, which can temporarily take on different shapes in real time. Such devices are still very expensive, but that will change.

One day these two threads of research will merge, and then we will have the ability to create intricate and dynamically moving shapes of any shape or size, shapes that we can interact with directly. In fact, this is an explicit long term goal of Hiroshi Ishii’s research.

It’s fun to think about what that world will be like, and what we will be able to do when it arrives. The possibilities may be limited only by our imagination.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *