Smart 'Lego' blocks take touch screens into 3D - tech - 06 October 2009 - New Scientist

Description

Smart building blocks plus Microsoft's Surface interactive table-top computer have taken touch-screen interaction into the third dimension. Engineers or architects could use them to develop designs, or it could become a new kind of building toy.

Touch screens are becoming standard for smartphones and beginning to appear in personal computers too : last year, Microsoft launched Surface, a computer in the form of a table with a touch-screen top. But, as the name suggests, touch screens only work with direct contact.

Now, Patrick Baudisch , Torsten Becker and Frederik Rudeck at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany have lifted the interaction away from the screen. When their building blocks, or Luminos, are stacked to form complicated structures on top of a Surface screen, the computer can map the building as it grows.

Vertical presence

Each Lumino block has a pattern on its base that identifies its 3D shape, and the Surface table can read them using its four internal cameras that peer up at the acrylic top. That means the computer can build up a 3D picture of what lies on its surface.

The Luminos can also make themselves known to the Surface when they're stacked up, however. They are packed with fibre-optic threads that ferry the pattern of any block placed on top of another down to the screen. So, although a second storey Lumino isn't in direct contact with the touch screen, the computer knows it's there (see video).

As blocks stack up, the risk increases that the patterns from different layers of Luminos will become too jumbled for the screen to interpret. But the fibre-optic bundles are angled so that the pattern visible to the screen at the bottom of a stack includes parts of the patterns of all its blocks. ...

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