THAW allows seamless interaction between phone and computer screen
By Alyn Wallace, Interesting Engineering, 1 October 2014.
By Alyn Wallace, Interesting Engineering, 1 October 2014.
Researchers from MIT’s Tangible Media Group, which exists to make the digital world feel more physical, and Fluid Interface Group, which aims to make human-computer interactions more seamless, are developing a ’magic lens’ dubbed THAW that allows for seamless interactions between your phone and computer screen, allowing for slick file drops and easy transfers from screen to screen.
The video below demonstrates just how easy it is to drag and drop files between your phone and computer - just place your phone in front of the computer screen and drag the files as you normally would. Other examples show the phone ‘pick-up’ a video game from the computer so that you can continue where you left off on your handheld device. And there’s a lot more.
“We live in an increasingly digital world, but that world is fractured between many screens and interfaces,” says Philipp Schoessler from the Tangible Media Group. “The question we wanted to try to answer with THAW was how can we combine these computer interfaces and screens into a single seamless experience.”
THAW covers your screen with a coloured grid but it cleverly hides it by only displaying it underneath where the phone is overlaying. This coloured grid allows the device to know which part of the screen it is overlaying. Although this concept is a rather simple one, it opens doors to perform a variety of complex interactions in such a simple manner as the devices communicate between each other wirelessly.
“We’re displaying the pattern only behind where the phone’s camera is looking; it’s like a peep hole you can see through,” explains Sang-won Leigh of the Fluid Interface Group.
Leigh designed a polar bear game influenced by his love for the Super Mario Bros. games where you can use your phones device as both a physical obstacle and an aid for the game’s character.
“In Leigh’s game, the goal is to move a polar bear to a flag at the end of the level, but each level has a different mechanism. In one level, you might have to cross a pit full of spikes by using your iPhone as a physical platform for your bear to jump across; in the next, you might capture the bear in your iPhone, physically shake the device, then shoot him over to an island across the world like a champagne cork,” explains Brownlee at Fast Company.
The team are not even interested in commercialising the product but would rather release it open-source as to allow developers worldwide to have a chance at playing with the possibilities of the tech.
“We don’t really think of it as a product,” says Schoessler. “We’ve really just touched the surface of the applications - I think it would be nice to see what other people might come up with.”
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