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MIT Siftables

Siftables are intelligent building blocks currently under development at MIT's Media Lab.

The goal of Siftables is to "enable people to interact with information and media in physical, natural ways that approach interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives," on the theory that the traditional GUI is a poor substitute for the way humans have actually interacted with their environment for eons, i.e. with their hands, and that much has been lost through GUIs that could be regained through TUIs (tangible user interfaces).

Each Siftable is a small block about the size of half a domino with an embedded 20 MHz AVR processor with ultra-low power requirements. It interacts with humans via a tiny OLED panel, and is capable of "understanding" a large number of gestural interaction languages and HCI applications. Humans essentially tell each block what to do (within the boundaries of the block's specific programming) by the way they hold it or gesture with it. Each

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Siftables in the news--check out this article in the New York Times about them: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/technology/interactive-cubes-recall-games-of-the-past-state-of-the-art.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&src=dayp
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