Tangible Technology

Many times, technology is not tangible. The art, the sounds, the results, the data that is spewed from a computer program is shown or displayed through an LED light. Here is a video about tangible technology, technology that affects something physical and has an instantaneous and amazing visual impact.

The tangibility of such a technology is something that could be used to improve not only mathematical  computations and visualization such as plotting a cosine function in some 3D space, but this can be very worth while in an artistic sense. With a Kinect sensor, as shown in the video, you can formulate a hand, move objects, roll a ball down a slide, and better yet trigger different actions by use of colors and light. Such a technology can have many implications in an art performance. For example, imagine a giant floor of these tiles, and a mastermind off to the side moving a person standing on these tiles. Of course, the dimensions of the tiles would have to be much greater, but the possibilities of what sort of artistic expression that can come out of this technology is amazing.

Even more, such technology has great implications in the visualization and education of some fundamental math and science problems. First, as mentioned before, the visual quality of this tangible technology helps us visualize and fully take in what we see. For example, with cosine, we can see the curves it makes in a live 3-d structural object. However, even more so, this could also be used to create puzzles or perhaps mazes that can test the our wits. In addition, image a board of these tiles being able to display Braille on the spot. With integration of some speech recognition software or some other input device, this could help  this type of tangible technology could vastly help deaf and mute people communicate. Although this video demonstrates some incredible features, we are only scratching the surface of what this type of technology can do.