Siftables are smallcomputers that display graphics on their top surface and sense one another and how they are being moved. Siftables were developed as a platform for hands-on interactions with digital information and media and were the prototype forSifteo cubes.
Siftables were created byDavid Merrill andJeevan Kalanithi when they were graduate students at theMIT Media Lab. Merrill and Kalanithi are friends from their undergraduate years at Stanford, where they both majored insymbolic systems, Merrill focusing onhuman-computer interaction and Kalanithi onartificial intelligence andneuroscience.
Merrill and Kalanithi were surrounded by colleagues at the Media Lab who were working onwireless sensor networks (e.g. the Tribble project,[1]) and tangible user interfaces (e.g. Topobo[2]). Merrill and Kalanithi wanted to create a general-purpose tangible user interface that leveraged the technologies of wireless sensor networks. From this idea came the idea of interactive tiles that would enable people to interact with collections of virtual objects—digital pictures, document files, etc.—in the same way that people interact with collections of small physical objects likeLEGO —another common sight at the Media Lab.
The initial applications envisioned for Siftables were organizingpersonal media (digital photos, songs, videos) and facilitatingbusiness processes, such as coordinating people, distributing tasks, and creatingGantt charts.
Merrill was invited to present Siftables at the 2009TED Conference, held in Long Beach / Palm Springs February 3–7, 2009. During his talk, he demonstrated several applications on Siftables: portraits that reacted to being placed next to one another, mixing colors from "paint buckets" on adjacent cubes, building theFibonacci sequence with an arithmetic application, creating words by arranging individual letters, an interactive graphical narrative for children, and constructing a music sequence. The video of Merrill's TED talk quickly went viral once online, attracting over 1 million views. With this indication of widespread interest in the concept of Siftables, Merrill and Kalanithi decided to focus on developing Siftables into aretail product.
The transformation of Siftables intoSifteo cubes (the retail product sold bySifteo, Inc.) required a complete re-implementation of code and hardware. While the underlying capabilities—the ability to sense tilting, shaking, rotation, and neighboring—of Siftables and Sifteo cubes are the same, the technology behind them is significantly different.
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