February 9  

At the MIT Media Laboratory, the Tangible Media Group thinks the foreseeable future of the computer is tactile. Revealed recently, the inFORM is MIT's brand-new scrying pool for visualizing the user interfaces of the future. Practically like a board of living bricks, the inFORM is a structure that three-dimensionally alters form, enabling individuals to not just connect with online information but also hold hands with an individual many kilometers away. It's essentially an elaborate Pinscreen, any of those executive workdesk playthings that enables you to make an approximate 3-D design of anything by pushing it into a base of smoothed pins. With inFORM, each one of those "pins" is attached to an electric motor manipulated by an adjacent laptop computer, which can reposition the pins to transcribe digital material in physical form, and is able to even have an effect on real-life materials as a result of being connected to a modified Microsoft Kinect.