AUTHORS

Disruptomatic
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a freelance copywriter, journalist and strategist based in Paris. She co-founded AdVerveBlog.com, a blog and podcast about ads and design, and writes MarketingProfs' “Get to the Point!: Social Media” newsletters. She likes people and animals, but not as much as books.
Tweet her @luckthelady.
James Martin
James Martin is the community manager of music & TV tradeshows midem & MIPTV/MIPCOM. He edits their respective industry news & trends blogs (blog.midem.com & mipblog.com) and also covers video games and technology for French cultural weekly A Nous Paris
Tweet him at @jamesmart_in
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He writes about digital music for Music Ally, and about apps and mobile for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Appside, as well as his own Apps Playground site.
Tweet him @stuartdredge

MIT’s T(ether) tactile AR is all kinds of awesomeness

Remember Wild Palms? Way back in the 90s, Oliver Stone, Kathryn Bigelow, James Belushi and a few others made a sci-fi series where TV had become holograms projected into your living room. The freaky part was you could take a drug which enabled you to touch and interact with said holograms, totally blurring the real/virtual divide and making lots of people crazy.

As a gamer, I’ve always longed for this to happen, whilst fearing it at the same time. Well, those clever chaps at MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group have just got very close. T(ether) allows you to manipulate virtual objects in real time… and space. You simply attach a dongle to your iPad, which interacts with a similar device on your glove. You then look ‘through’ the iPad to create and move blocks which seem like they’re really there.

Perhaps the most impressive part of the above demo is the multi-‘player’ aspect (from 3 min 30 secs into the video): two people can build a structure together, by looking through 2 iPads at the same area, and placing virtual blocks on top of each other. This collaborative aspect could well make T(ether) a killer app for people like animators, its creators hope. Fingers crossed it does that… and much more!

Source: FastCoCreate via Wired