Slurp: A Digital Eyedropper

Digital media is like water; it’s difficult to pick up with your bare hands. Unless, that is, you have a digital eyedropper.

Using water as a metaphor, Slurp is a tangible interface designed to “extract (slurp up) and inject (squirt out)” information from one object or device to the next. As words do Slurp little justice, check out the eye-dropping demonstrations of the concept after the jump.

Scenario: locative media

Scenario: smart office

By providing haptic and visual feedback during the extracting and injecting process, Slurp is one genius step towards “physicalizing” digital media, a monumental task:

Digital objects come in many shapes, sizes, formats, packages, and levels of complexity; it is this very dynamism that makes digital technology so compelling. Abstract digital media resists being captured by physical form for good reason—the constraints of static physicality could overly constrict such media’s use. – Jamie Zigelbaum. MIT Media Lab

While Slurp may seem fanciful at present, its application could be everyday useful in the near future:

As computation spreads further into the real world one can envision a future where every physical object is created with a digital object attached to it. For example, it would be nice to have a spec sheet for the
light bulb you just bought incorporated directly into the light bulb itself, or to have media files showing the
history of an antique couch come embedded in the couch rather than on external media. These media files could be modified or added on to; in the couch example the new owners could add their own experiences to the couch’s history. The information stored in the physical object could be a simple url, allowing for the participatory culture of the current Internet to extend into physical space and objects. – Jamie Zigelbaum. MIT Media Lab

Would you Slurp?

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