Sometimes your favorite piece of technology can make you feel like a kid playing with their favorite toy when you’re using it. It’s just an added benefit that your new favorite toy often provides some sort of additional life benefit outside of being fun to play with, making it the technological equivalent of Kix cereal. Kid tested, mother approved.
This new piece of technology in the works at MIT seems to fit that design philosophy. It’s a series of self-assembling cubes that are able to function independently and can quickly form a variety of shapes with almost no human interaction required.
Functioning off of a complex mixture of computer chips, flywheels, and magnets, the basic tech behind these cubes may bring back those childhood toy memories and make you start dreaming of their use in the ultimate “Transformers” toy, but the team behind them are already dreaming up some pretty amazing potential real life uses for them, including uses in quickly repairing structures, or forming must have items in emergencies quickly, such as hospital beds.
The final uses for this invention may be up in the air, but it’s clear that the technology is as good as the developer’s intentions, which usually serves as the basis to great products.
Though hopefully, after these are done saving the world, we can actually get that sweet new “Transformer’s” toy.
