There’s been ever increasing news about “digital clay”; so much so it’s difficult to not trip over all the articles showing up online. WorldChanging explains the concept pretty well I think:
Claytronics research arose out of a combination of work on microscale computing devices and work on telepresence, so it’s not surprising that the researchers emphasize the utility of the claytronics system as a means of doing virtual meetings with apparent physical presence.
You might recall an earlier post of mine which touched on a related subject. It’s fascinating stuff and I’m looking forward to seeing the technology mature.
At the heart of this all afaik is Smart Dust, a technology that started showing up on my radar while surfing the web’s more off-the-beaten path sites like Nanotechnology Now, a good source for this kind of information (example). Anyone who watched Star Trek: The Next Generation back in 1989 probably had some idea about this potential technology just from watching the “nanites” episode. It was cool then and it’s just as cool now. And the merging of Smart Dust technology with telepresence is equally compelling.
But there’s so much news coming out I haven’t had time to properly digest it all… and so I’ve decided not to try right now. Instead I’ll just post some links and you can read them for yourself if you’re interested.
Why bother with this entry then? Well, mainly because a long time ago I used to make claymation movies and have always loved the look of it. And because some of the articles use claymation (which is really just stop motion animation using clay) as a way to explain the technology (now being dubbed “claytronics”), I wanted to use some crude subliminal techniques to draw your attention to a small indy game developer called Squashy Software, a one-man operation (I’m pretty sure) on the far end of the Long Tail. The above screenshot is from a forthcoming videogame called Cletus Clay (I love it). You can check out more screenshots and even give his other game, Platypus, a test drive. Heck, maybe even buy it (/crude subliminal endorsement).
Okay. Sorry about hijacking my own post. Here are some links:
PARC Research: Smart Matter Integrated Systems
Carnegie Mellon Univ: Claytronics – Synthetic Reality
Intel: Dynamic Physical Rendering
WorldChanging.com: Xerox PARC and Smart Matter
Post-Gazette.com: ‘Programmable matter’ one day could transform itself into all kinds of look-alikes
WorldChanging.com: Claytronics and the Pario World
(above image © Squashy Software)