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When Things Start to Think

Neil Gershenfeld

1999

225 pages

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Woodrow Barfield and Thomas Caudell

Yuichi Ohta and Hideyuki Tamura

Steve Mann

Keywords

Theory

Design

Augmented Reality

Resources

 

An excellent look into the near future. Gershenfeld explores the ways in which technology that we have reserved only for the desktop computer, will emerge into our everyday life. One of the most interesting ideas is the Personal fabricator, a 3D printer, which allows people to design and recreate things from designs in real life. Gershenfeld explains that there is no need to confine the creation of multimedia to the computer screen, why can’t the ordinary person design and fabricate real 3D objects in the home.

Gershenfeld, of the MIT media lab, offers a survey of several inspiring ideas; he explores the idea of smart money, books that reformat themselves to display different texts, shoes that can hold and exchange information.