Imagine if you combined the purpose of a pantograph with the resolution of those 3D Pin Art toys, then made it much more hi-tech. That's what you have with inFORM, the table that recreates 3D objects scanned from a nearby interface, developed by Hiroshi Ishii (previously at Neatorama) and his students at the MIT Media Lab.
Cameras capture the objects in the tangible interface from at least three angles, and a computer processes that information into 3D data, which is recreated on the table. It will all make sense when you watch the video. Read more about it in this report from MIT (pdf). -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The X-Men had this as their operations planning table. It was pretty cool in CGI, it's pretty cool in RL too.
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