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+--- Thread: STNG's holodeck has arrived? Interacting levitating matter & 3D display combined (/thread-1550.html)
STNG's holodeck has arrived? Interacting levitating matter & 3D display combined - C C - Nov 7, 2015
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/pixeldrones-offer-3d-computer-displays-based-on-programmable-matter
EXCERPT: How's this for a bad-ass future? "Interactive self-levitating programmable matter." This is how researchers at Queens University's Human Media Lab are describing their new virtual reality scheme, dubbed BitDrones [...]
The floating interface is enabled by swarms of nano quadcopters [...] of which there are three varieties. "PixelDrones" come equipped with a single LED and a small dot-matrix display; "ShapeDrones," which are intended to form the building blocks of 3D models, come covered in a fine mesh and a 3D printed geometric frame; and, finally, "DisplayDrones" are fitted with a curved flexible high-resolution touchscreen, a forward-facing video camera, and an Android smartphone board. [...]
It turns out that the concept of a physical 3D computer interface has been around for a long time. Even when computers still consisted of room-sized monoliths, engineers were busily dreaming up machines capable of morphing through their environments: computers as spaces....