Yes, COVID-19 has made the year 2020 a living nightmare and yes, it’s still here… we think – Is it? No? Yes? Well, at least the flu is no more. You already know how some people are asymptomatic (meaning HEALTHY), which is used as an additional method to keep you in fear, but I digress.…
While humankind has made great strides in creating Terminator-like robotic appendages, we’re still a ways from an artificial arm that moves and acts precisely like a flesh-and-blood appendage. Yet, a team of MIT technologists recently created a robot gripper that might help pave the path for one. The Origami Robot Gripper is a robotic arm…
You don’t have to be an absolute green thumb to understand how plants eat, breathe, and even generate their own bio-electricity. But can a plant use its own bio-energy sources to power a robot? Thanks to a recent project by MIT scientists Harpreet Sareen and Pattie Maes, we now know. Elowan is a self-driving robot powered…
All of us were told off from drawing on the walls as children for a lot of reasons. Maybe it’s because we couldn’t reach high enough for our parents to appreciate our work. Or perhaps they couldn’t see art if it was right in front of their faces. Or it could just be the uncleanable,…
Researchers from MIT have developed a new technique to enable highly detailed, multi-material 3D prints from 3D scanners. “By using voxel-printing methods, superfluous preparation overhead and loss in detail can be prevented. This approach enables one to directly translate volumetric property gradients to 3D printable material gradients. Hence, if preservation of the given data representation…
Fans of inflatable bouncy castles and comfy car seats have reason to rejoice because 3D-printed inflatables are now a thing! Created by the minds at the Self-Assemble Lab of MIT and BMW, these inflatables adapt and transform by themselves to suit your comfy needs. Dubbed “Liquid Printed Pneumatics,” these silicone materials take on different shapes…
3D printing in color can be costly. Given how much time and resources spent upfront, having a failed print isn’t exactly as easy to deal with as printing a 2D color picture incorrectly. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)’s new ColorFab method (not to be confused with printing filament company ColorFabb) doesn’t aim…
Rendering physical systems in computer simulations can be a daunting task even for the best of programmers, and more so if more than one model parameter is required. If you’re familiar with MATLAB or Eigen, then you know what it takes to develop some of these simulations and the number of lines of complex code…
It’s no secret that assembling the dozens –– or hundreds –– of parts that make up a consumer electronic product assembly is both costly and time-intensive. But what if said electronics could –– gosh darn it –– just assemble themselves? What better things have they got going on? Such is the premise behind the latest project…
As a research group focused on making user experiences more seamless, natural and integrated into our physical lives, MIT’s Fluid Interfaces research collective exists at the forefront of what’s next in interaction design. Founded by tech pioneer Pattie Maes, the goal of the group is to design and develop interfaces that are a more natural…
When it comes to pretty much anything new and exciting, MIT and all of their various labs are almost always fairly dependable. More recently, the team at the school’s Tangible Media Group updated their interactive pin table – a table that’s capable of reproducing a virtual version of any object placed under its sensors in…
Between the various product design entrepreneurs and hardware startups that continue to find success without formal industrial design or mechanical engineering training – as well as the increasing costs of college tuition, the line between needing to have a formal product development education or not for striking it out on your own is becoming increasingly…
In the case you haven’t heard about the wonderfully-wacky and potentially life-changing Liquid-Glide yet, stop doing whatever you’re currently doing and immediately watch this. Born out of one of the more frustrating feelings in the first world – struggling to get the last bit of ketchup out of the bottle or the last squirt of…
Of all the robot apocalypse scenarios that cross your mind on any given day, who would have thought one would be a autonomous, rubbery, four-legged crawl-bot? With a design that looks more like an drunk Alien facehugger than a Darpa creation, the soft robot contains no rigid skeleton and can move all 25 inches of…
So far we’ve seen 3D printing being used at the consumer/prosumer level as a way to create static objects with relatively few—if any—moving parts. A large part of this is due to the rampant use of low-level CAD programs that offer little more than digital pushing and pulling combined with an output method that is…
3D printed food is nothing new…however the desire to eat something extruded out of cables and wires is still something that most people haven’t quite wrapped their heads around yet. Despite this food innovation hump, the move to create on-demand food is still pushing forward on a seemingly weekly basis with applications ranging from providing…
Consider it a handheld 3D printer of sorts—and not of the stringy-glue gun variety. The FreeD is MIT’s latest cool piece of tech that is essentially a handheld milling machine that allows a user to sculpt a pre-defined shape from a 3D model. As 3D printer manufacturers are moving towards higher resolution and accuracy in…
Neri Oxman just can’t help being Neri Oxman. Always on the forefront of the next big thing, she famously revealed a line of runway-ready 3D printed apparel before 3D printing was even a buzzword. Revealed this week, the latest project to come out of Neri’s innovative Mediated Matter program at MIT centers around the intersection…
MIT is in no shortage of true innovators these days, and the projects just keep on coming. The latest innovation by interaction researcher Jinha Lee involves “the enabling of humans to physically interact with machines to make computing more intuitive” through a transparent computer, allowing the user to reach inside of a ‘box’ and manipulate/adjust…
In a collaboration between 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys’ Education and R&D Departments and MIT’s new Self-Assembly Lab, a new printing technique centered around self-assembling, ‘smart’ materials is being used right now. Hold onto your pants ladies and gentlemen, 4D Printing is here.
Quick, while everyone is distracted with the aftermath of CES, drop what you’re doing right now and have a look at sunglass.io immediately. Sunglass.io is a venture-backed MIT startup, based out of San Francisco, co-founded by Kaustuv DeBiswas and Nitin Rao. Today, they’ve launched Sunglass.io, a browser-based environment for seamless collaboration and soon, a suite…