Siftables - Physical Interaction with Digital Information!
Another Paradigm of Human Computer Interaction

In this digital age we interact with computers or computer systems a lot (sometimes even more than we interact with other humans!). Using smart phones, working on PCs, using ATM machine, using vending machine, automatic parking systems are a few examples of our daily interaction with computer systems and since we interact with computers so much engineers always try to push boundaries to make human computer interaction (HCI) more friendly, easy, responsive and closer to how we interact with our physical world or other humans for that matter.

Imagine a completely new level of interaction with computers where we use physical objects to manipulate digital information/media on computers. But before we introduce it, let us take an example. Let us say you have a pile of photographs with you (hardcopies) and you wish to sort, sift (select) them in some order. You will look at the photographs; use both your hands, fingers and all your sorting and sifting skills to do the task. Now if you have to do the same task for your digital photographs on computer you will use mouse or touch to do the job. This method not very interactive compare to physically doing it with your hands.

Siftables is a device that is designed to do such physical manipulations to digital data. Siftables are tiny biscuit sized computer tiles that you can stack together, shuffle in your hands, arrange in any particular order just like physical objects. Siftables talk to each other through wireless sensor network.

Each Siftables tile feature a color LCD screen whose input is given by a computer it is connected to, a 3-axis accelerometer so that siftables tile knows it position and relative position to other tiles, four IrDA infrared transceivers for communication with nearby tiles (1cm range), an onboard rechargeable battery and an RF radio for wireless communication with computer. Siftables form a wireless sensor network so that they communicate with other and perform a desired function/task. The task is performed based on the instance of data populated on each LCD screen of each siftables and their relative position to each other.

Siftables Technology

Let us say you have 5 siftables and four of them are displaying following values on LCD screens 1, 2,+ = if you place them in right order they will perform a mathematical operation of addition and show a result on the 5th siftables tile.

This interactive looking device or rather devices look very fascinating and will redefine our interaction with computers. I imagine playing jig-saw puzzle using siftables (I am not sure, if it is possible tough). Kids would love to play games using them or learn math.

All in all this technology look quite fascinating and is developed by David Merrill, Jeevan Kalanithi, Pattie Maes at MIT Media Laboratory, U.S.A. Their paper on Siftables is available online.

By Sagar Juneja - Research Associate, Chitkara University

Reference
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~dmerrill/publications/dmerrill_siftables.pdf