We introduce Glume, a modular scalable building system with the physical immediacy of a soft and malleable material. The Glume system consists of soft and translucent augmented modules, which communicate capacitively to their neighbors to determine a network topology and are responsive to human touch. Glume explores a unique area of augmented building materials by combining a discrete internal structure with a soft and organic material quality to relax the rigidity of structure and form in previous tangible building block approaches.
We envision Glume as a tool for constructing and manipulating models, visualizations and simulations of organically based three dimensional data sets.

References

Amanda Parkes, Vincent LeClerc, and Hiroshi Ishii. 2006. Glume: exploring materiality in a soft augmented modular modeling system. In CHI ’06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’06). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1211-1216. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1125451.1125678