Inspired by a water hose, MIT’s Tangible Media Group wants you to control connected devices with their cords.
It happens all the time: You reach into your bag, pocket or desk to pull out your headphones. And, no matter how neatly they were wrapped up beforehand, the cords are a tangled mess. Pair this with the rise of wireless technologies, and you can see why they’ve gotten a bad rap throughout the years. However, what if those cables were used as an interface with your connected devices? Imagine if such things as tying knots, stretching, pinching and kinking the wire could actually control the flow of data and/or power of your gadgets.
That’s what one joint research team, led by Philipp Schoessler of MIT’s Tangible Media Group and Sang-won Leigh of the Fluid Interfaces Group, has set out to do. Aptly called Cord UIs, it’s a project that wants to turn cords into a user interface and hopefully give them a meaning…
View original post 970 more words
