...or your android enabled phones snuggle?

As a storyboard artist I could see the photo sorting and expanding feature as a great utility for displaying and presenting multiple ideas at once. Being able to rearrange and expand panels could be extremely beneficial. Otherwise I see very little need for this sort of technology in a real world environment. Maybe im wrong, would anybody else's profession benefit from such a product?

I dont see how useful they are. Can u eat them?

MIT Media Lab's main research is in how to get media coverage. 90% of what they do is utter crap, but generates lots of media attention.

project design flowcharts would be really good with these

cmon guys you need to realize, that these are research prototypes, not end products, when such platforms of interaction are developed, they display potentialities of something that can be inherited into an end product. When platform exists, applications will follow.
Most new great ideas sound stupid or useless at concept level...

"ultimately useless"?

MIT Media Labs doesn't make products, they make research. The function of Shiftables is supposed to be as a proof of concept, and in that respect it is extremely useful. Why not link to the research paper that was published with the video?

I've already got one use, inspired by the last part.

Kids like computers, but benefit from manipulatives (physical things they can hold in their hands). Create matching games. Say... match the siftable with the word "verb" to the pictures of verbs. If correct, they light up green. If not, red.

Or, here's another one: Take some siftables with words on them and move them around to make a sentence. A happy face nods approvingly when a correct sentence is generated. Move them around to make a new sentence.

The educational possibilities are endless.

Ooh, ooh! Algebra manipulatives! Need I say more?

OK, now when someone makes any of these (or related) products, they can contact me here for the mailing address for my check. No, wait. Checks.

Soooo... MIT reivented Cube World? I don't get it.

@dukemang:

basically the same thing with a high rez color screen and doesn't include little pixelated stick men that play with each other.

(that sounded VERY wrong)

Thanks MIT, nobody would have ever invented the Brady Bunch interface without you.

Same concept as microsoft surface, but with cubes. Yay?

There's a reason why some people can envision things like this - and others can only write snide comments about them.

Well if you get enough siftables you can make your very own Optimus Maximus Keyboard!

Now that's what I call a revolutionary new interface that changes the way we interact with our computing systems, granted it's theory more than anything prepackaged into tomorrow's application of the day, but this is the type of thing I am expecting from the next post that mentions new UI! not just a phone with flash-like buttons (iphone!)