Radical Interface Design
Overview
This is a set of concept projects I did with others with Prof. Hiroshi Ishii of the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. Ishii et. al. coins a new term radical atoms - things that can change shapes, colors, etc. based on the situations. While it still sounds like science fiction, with nanotechnology advances we may see more and more of these in the next 50 years. It’s fair if you think this is crazy (I did too initially), but 50 years ago people would have thought the iPad was a crazy concept too. I think the key messages of the concepts are the interaction elements and experience, so being crazy is OK.
Our concepts mostly evolve around the kitchen (who doesn’t like to eat : >). These are all stop motion videos and we have a working paper that summaries our vision, which also includes a lot of related work in radical atoms/shapeshifting materials:
ByteSizer
Imagine a smart countertop and appliances that knows what you are doing, including what you are cooking, what you are about to cut/chop, etc. In this video, you can see a futuristic knife that can scan raw materials and project onto them visual guidelines that the user can follow with ease, changes shape based on the materials, and work seamlessly with the other countertop surfaces.
Diff
This is a concept that aims to help users who learn new physical skill with ease using personalized and wearable technologies. For example, if we learn Tai Chi, we want to be able to practice our moves and know how much difference ours have compared to the the master’s. When we cut food, we want to know if we can cut similar to a top chef.
In this video, the user wears radical gloves that detects and records movements, displays ambient information, and accepts user gestures for queries.
DoIP (Dish-over-IP)
Everyone loves mom’s cooking. How can we enjoy that while being hundreds/thousands of miles away? Can we “record” mom’s cooking, sent it over the Internet, and “replay” so we can have basically the same dish that we can enjoy?
Better yet, because the cooking is now in bits, we can literally copy and send to many other users for sharing. And if such concepts become a reality, restaurants around the world can do their own DoIP recordings and sell their cookings to different users.
