Siftables are small computers that display graphics on their top surface and sense one another and how they are being moved. Siftables were developed as a platform for hands-on interactions with digital information and media and were the prototype for Sifteo cubes. Siftables were created b
David Merrill
an
Jeevan Kalanithi
when they were graduate students at the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

. Merrill and Kalanithi are friends from their undergraduate years at Stanford, where they both majored in

symbolic system In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of sy ...

s, Merrill focusing on human-computer interaction and Kalanithi on

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

and

neuroscience Neuroscience is the science, scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a Multidisciplinary approach, multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, an ...

. Merrill and Kalanithi were surrounded by colleagues at the Media Lab who were working on

wireless sensor network Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) refer to networks of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors that monitor and record the physical conditions of the environment and forward the collected data to a central location. WSNs can measure environmental c ...

s (e.g. the Tribble project,) and tangible user interfaces (e.g. Topobo Topobo
/ref>). Merrill and Kalanithi wanted to create a general-purpose tangible user interface that leveraged the technologies of wireless sensor networks. From this idea came the idea of interactive tiles that would enable people to interact with collections of virtual objects—digital pictures, document files, etc.—in the same way that people interact with collections of small physical objects like

LEGO Lego ( , ; stylized as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously colored interlockin ...

—another common sight at the Media Lab. The initial applications envisioned for Siftables were organizing personal media (digital photos, songs, videos) and facilitating

business process A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a parti ...

es, such as coordinating people, distributing tasks, and creating

Gantt chart A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule, named after its popularizer, Henry Gantt (1861–1919), who designed such a chart around the years 1910–1915. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency relationsh ...

s. Merrill was invited to present Siftables at the 2009

TED Conference TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded by Richard Sau ...

, held in Long Beach / Palm Springs February 3–7, 2009. During his talk, he demonstrated several applications on Siftables: portraits that reacted to being placed next to one another, mixing colors from "paint buckets" on adjacent cubes, building the

Fibonacci sequence In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted , form a sequence, the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. The sequence commonly starts from 0 and 1, although some authors start the sequence from ...

with an arithmetic application, creating words by arranging individual letters, an interactive graphical narrative for children, and constructing a music sequence. The video of Merrill's TED talk quickly went viral once online, attracting over 1 million views. With this indication of widespread interest in the concept of Siftables, Merrill and Kalanithi decided to focus on developing Siftables into a

retail Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and th ...

product. The transformation of Siftables into Sifteo cubes (the retail product sold b
Sifteo, Inc.
required a complete re-implementation of code and hardware. While the underlying capabilities—the ability to sense tilting, shaking, rotation, and neighboring—of Siftables and Sifteo cubes are the same, the technology behind them is significantly different.

External links

* D. Merrill, J. Kalanithi and P. Maes
Siftables: Towards Sensor Network User Interfaces

TED Talks: David Merrill demos Siftables, the smart blocks
at TED in 2009
MIT Media Labcast #20: Siftables

'Next gen UI: Learning tools and toys for the digital age.'Smart Planet
October 7, 2009.

October 27, 2009.

References

{{reflist Classes of computers User interfaces

See also

External links

References