Core77

Carnegie-Mellon's Synthetic Reality Project involves something called claytronics, "an ensemble of individual components, called catoms...that can move in three dimensions, adhere to other catoms to maintain a 3D shape, and compute state information."

The video they've whipped up to promote their project shows what they're going for:

Still, there are huuuuge logic and interface gaps here. Are we supposed to believe the boss-guy at the meeting grunts "Make the roof lower," so the designer-guy touches it and it automatically goes to the desired height? What about proportions, angles and arcs?

We appreciate envelope-pushing but at this point, this video is about as useful to modern-day industrial designers as the video R2D2 projects showing Princess Leia asking Obi-Wan for help.

via tfts