This project pursues research to develop a form of programmable matter, called Claytronics, and investigates how it can be used to create dynamic 3D physical artifacts. Claytronics is an ensemble of individual components, called catoms, each of which is a self-contained computer that can communicate, move, and adhere to other catoms. Using Claytronics, this research investigates new forms of communication media, called "pario", which can be used to capture and reproduce dynamic 3D objects. Using pario, the project seeks to develop science and technology to enable applications such as "pario-conferencing", which, unlike video-conferencing, renders participants and their environments as actual physical objects that can interact, rather than as images on a video screen.
In pursuit of this long-range vision, the project is designing and building prototypes that will scale in both catom count (towards millions of catoms) and catom size (towards microns in radius). This entails research along many fronts, including: new materials, methods of locomotion, packaging, 3D capture, distributed planning and programming, networking, and simulation. The project is developing the means by which users can program an ensemble of catoms as a single entity and make it appear to act as a single entity even though each catom operates independently.
Like the telephone (audio) and the television (video), the advent of Claytronics (pario) is expected to have significant ramifications by increasing the quality of communication between humans. On the scientific front, Claytronics will be a testbed for solving some of the most challenging problems we face today: how to build complex, massively distributed dynamic systems. The research is a step towards integrating computation directly into our physical environment, by integrating it into the very artifacts around us and allowing them to interact with the world.
