Glume - Modeling Medium

The Tangible Media group at MIT developed a generalized modular scalable building sytem which they have titled "Glume". Glume has 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.
The group envision Glume to be 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 is thought to provide 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.

Data visualization provides a powerful educational technique as well as a important activity for professionals, such as architecture, geology, hydrology, or medicine.

Related Project's
- John Frazer’s 3D Intelligent ModelingSystem from 1980 set an early precedent as a setof stacking building blocks which send messages to adjacent blocks to determine geometric configuration.

- Digital Clay developed at Xerodetex Parc, a system of rhombic dodecahedrons whose modules have the capacity to sense their own orientation in space with respect to other modules.

- Phoxel Space projects a voxel dataset onto the surface of a physical materialand the 3D volumetric display from Actuality Systems display a 3D volumetric image by sweeping a semi-transparent 2-D image plane around a vertical axis.