Next gen UI: Learning tools and toys for the digital age

What if you no longer needed a screen, mouse, and keyboard to use a computer? Siftables creator, David Merrill, shows us how individual, cookie cutter-sized tiles that use motion sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication will teach users a new way to learn.



David Merrill: My name's David Merrill and I'm a principal at Taco Lab based in San Francisco and we build next generation user interfaces.

Background Music My background is in cognitive science and computer science and I've been interested for a long time in how our interactions with computers can be more natural and more efficient and more delightful. My colleague Jeevan Kalanithi and I were at the MIT Media Lab as graduate students, and we started working on a new physical interface called Siftables. Siftables is one example of what I think will be a new ecosystem of what I'm calling hand tools for the digital age, ways to interact with computation that's very different than the mouse and keyboard we use today.

Background Music We have built Siftables so that each tile is a little, self-contained interactive computer with a screen on top, the ability to sense its neighbors and the ability to communicate wirelessly. So you can represent a problem, say a math equation, on the screens of the Siftables with each screen showing one piece of the equation. And then by putting them together, it can compute the results of the equation showing you the answer. The way we use computers now, or even our mobile phones and other mobile devices is usually one person per display, one person per piece of technology. But Siftables is an example of what we've been calling cookie-scale computing where you've got smaller pieces of computation, the size of cookies, and you're actually interacting with a group of them together. And that's a version of computing that we haven't really seen yet, a way of interacting with computers that we think has a lot of potential to increase the ease with which we can manipulate digital information. I think our interfaces for computers in the future are going to take a lot of different forms that are not just gonna be the mouse and keyboard. And so that's really what I'm excited about is to see the ways that we can more seamlessly connect our brain and our intentions to what we can create with the computer, because it's a wonderful tool. It's got a lot of potential, but we're not yet leveraging it in the way that we could. That's the way that I want to interact with computers in the future, is for there to be a seamless translation from a thought that I have in my head to something that I've created with the machine.