While audio and video technologies have had a profound impact on our lives, it is important to remember that we do not live in a world of just sounds and moving images: we live in a physical, 3D world. To enable new classes of applications that are currently unthinkable, we would like to create a new technology (which we call “pario”) that will allow us to physically render moving 3D objects as real artifacts. Similar to how audio and video technologies allows us to capture and reproduce sound and moving images, respectively, with “pario” we could capture and reproduce the shape, motion, and appearance of arbitrary 3D objects. At Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Research Pittsburgh, we are exploring hardware and software techniques to make this vision a reality through something that we call “claytronics”. Claytronics is analogous to modeling clay that can control its own shape. It is comprised of very large numbers of very tiny robots that can collectively morph into arbitrary shapes under software control. In this talk, I will describe the technical progress that we have made so far on claytronics, as well as suggesting what this technology might enable.
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