“PlayWorks” is the title of a new permanent exhibition at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan aimed at children under 5.

“Beneath each image will be a second canvas, a textural and three-dimensional rendering, which a child can touch. And this installation will be just one in a series of interactive exhibits: a huge transparent wall whose surface is for fingerpainting; a climbing structure with hidden dioramas; a sand laboratory with buried “treasures”; a construction area for building gadgets; and, among many other displays, a mechanical baby dragon that will say words when children drop letters into its mouth. The exhibition’s emphasis is not the old saw that learning is fun, but that fun is learning.”

“The idea is that in moments of everyday play children are really getting a tremendous amount of education,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and an adviser to the project. “The significance of play as a foundation for learning is a critically important cultural message.”

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“>Nanoscape by artists and researchers Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau is an invisible sculpture that can be sensed via touch.

Users wear magnetic ring-interfaces and when moving the hand over the table of the installation, strong magnetic forces, repulsion, attraction and even slight shock can be felt.

Wireless magnetic force-feedback interface allows users to touch invisible nano particles, thus creating an changing invisible sculpture which modifies its shape and properties as users interact with it and with each other.

(via we-make-money-not-art)

tabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape and size, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.

The first case of study has been tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach; we are planning to integrate it with GIS products.

(via onTheTableTop)

Glume is a computationally enhanced translucent modeling medium which offers a generalised modular scalable platform with the physical immediacy of a soft and malleable tangible material.

The Glume system consists of soft and translucent augmented interlocking modules, each embedded with a full spectrum LED, which communicate capacitively to their neighbors to determine a network topology and are responsive to human touch.

We envision Glume as a viable tool for modeling, visualization and simulation of three dimensional data sets in which users construct and manipulate models whose morphology is determined through the distributed system. The Glume system provides a new and novel means for expression and investigation of organic forms and processes not possible with existing materials by relaxing the rigidity of structure in previous solid building block approaches.

by Vincent Leclerc, Amanda Parkes and Professor Hiroshi Ishii of MIT’s Tangible Media Group

HMC MediaLab’s Adam Montandon created Hyperfabric, a fabric-based interface that lets you reach beyond the screen. This “touchable” touchscreen, made out of an elastic latex-like fabric warps like rubber, and can sense how hard your press it, where you press it, even when several people use it at once. It feels like you are going “through” the screen.

(via we-make-money-not-art)

In each of the two cities Linz and Budapest a foot bridge made of wooden planks are installed. If someone steps on a plank in one of the cities, an impulse released from the body weight is immediately sent to the other bridge. So a pulse can be felt in the other city, as the parallel plank lifts itself around 1 cm which releases a pounding noise. One can feel realistically the footsteps of strangers in a foreign city.

(via Interactive Architecture)

The Do Not Touch installation by Christian Möller is part of an exhibition along the theme energy. A five meter tall stainless steel pole is standing in the center of a huge warning sign on the gallery floor telling the visitor “do not touch”.

It creates a conflict by tempting the visitor to do precisely what he is warned not to do. This conflict, when resolved through disobedience results in a jolting physical experience. Whenever somebody decides to ignore the warning by touching the pole he receives a significant electric shock amplified by sound.

Christian Möller, Installation in the Energy Gallery at the Science Museum London, 2004.