Magical modular furniture

#MIT #design #furniture #technology #Milano

Transform is a magical, modular furniture developed by MIT:

The work is comprised of three dynamic shape displays that move more than one thousand pins up and down in realtime to transform the tabletop into a dynamic tangible display. The kinetic energy of the viewers, captured by a sensor, drives the wave motion represented by the dynamic pins.
The motion design is inspired by the dynamic interactions among wind, water and sand in nature, Escher’s representations of perpetual motion, and the attributes of sand castles built at the seashore. TRANSFORM tells the story of the conflict between nature and machine, and its reconciliation, through the ever-changing tabletop landscape.

They came in Italy during the last design week, but I was busy at school, so I cannot go to see the exhibition and I had to settle with the videos:

It's a hard life...

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(via Wired)

The modular robot

by @ulaulaman about #MIT #robot #technology #modular

Starting from a famous speech by Richard Feynman (pdf), it was born nanotechnology. One day in future we'll probably have nano-chip, nano-computer, nano-bot, but for now we must content ourselves with the robots with wheels and legs that explore the remote corners of the Earth, and also arriving on Mars in the past years.
A possible evolution of robots is described in science fiction: for example in Alan Moore's Tom Strong, one of the enemy of the hero is the Modular Man, an electronic entity consistuted by many memory modules, separated but which together realized one of the most advanced and deadliest artificial intelligence in the world. Using the Modular Man, Moore brings back a classic of the genre: the revolt of the technology against mankind. A variation of this idea is proposed by Frank Schatzing in The Swarm, but in this last case the superintelligent entity is constituted by a lot of single-celled organisms that are separately very simple, but together extremely complex. In some sense also the swarms of insects could be understood like a single entity.
Let us suppose now that every single part of similar entity is electronic, and, for some reason, that the experiment is beyond the control of the toy factory that developed it: the consequence is a catastrofic novel, The Reproductive System (a.k.a. Mechasm)⁽¹⁾, written with a lot of humor by John Sladek, in which the writer describes some mechanism that are just a bit more advanced version of the Molecule, a self-assemble modular robot developed by Keith Kotay and Daniela Rus at MIT: