Jason & Susan

This is a video of a really neat project called Magic Paper, a joint research project between M.I.T. and Microsoft. Basically, the application is used on a tablet PC to mimic a pencil/paper sketching environment, but way cooler! The “smart” pad is able to recognize the objects that are drawn and apply the laws of physics to these objects. It’s a great design environment to test out ideas, evaluate designs, check for design flaws, etc… and all this done without actually building anything!

In some ways, Magic Paper is similar to LabVIEW, a graphical programming software created by Susan’s company (National Instruments). Both applications allow users to create and interact with graphical objects as they design some kind of process or flow.

Neat-o!