A friend of ours loves to joke that the future will have no hard edges; experience will be defined in pastel-colored gels, foams and mists that deliver your voicemail and bring you milk. Probably to his dismay, this new project from the Wakita Laboratoray at Keio University may one day prove him right.
Blob Motility is an early phase of a new "actuated shape display using programmable matter." With it, A gel substance can be programmed to a specific geometry and topology, resulting in organic shape-changing in real space—not unlike a "metaball" in computer graphics, as the lab points out.
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