CES Tradeshow
One of the many gadgets that stood out at last week’s CES global gadget showcase were ‘Siftables’, a series of digitally-enabled blocks that hold multiple uses within gaming, education and creativity. “They are sets of cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbour detection, graphical display, and wireless communication”, say Sifteo, the company behind the products. “Siftables act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them—piling, grouping, sorting—to interact with digital information and media”. Siftables are yet another demonstration of product designers and developers increasing ability to shift the digital world into the physical world.
Exploring the videos, you’ll see two examples that best demonstrate this. The first is a simple word game for brain training and education. The Siftables produce a series of letters; the user is expected to physically move the blocks to create words with the given letters. Once a word is made the blocks make a sound then the user is challenged to create a new word.
The second example is perhaps a more exciting demonstration because of the possibility of its use in live performance and creativity. It shows how the Siftables can be used create a live music sequencer. Simply by loading samples and beats into the blocks, positioning them and looping the sound the user can then manipulate through gesture led positioning of the blocks the control, pitch, volume, tempo and bass.
We’ve been keeping our eye on this new product since the creators David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, presented the idea at the world famous TED conference back in 2008. The duo first created the Siftables at MIT Media Lab and has since formed Sifteo with Brent Fitzgerald.
Although they haven’t announced when they’ll be launched yet, Sifteo are working on commercialising the technology. So we’ll be keeping an eye on when they drop in the UK, just watch this space.
Thanks to Neil Bennett for this story. SFTW would not exist without him.
