Computer as a partner! It is all within the reach of our hands!

With the current globalization trends, economic dependencies, and nuclear weapon ownership the doom side of technology is a myth. Much of the “media hype” drives this doom perception. We are in the dawn of a new era of technology dominated growth where a mix of science and engineering with deeper design will continue to create major shifts in the way we live and work, communicate and interact, as well as solve global problems. In this future, convergence of many factors such as low-cost sensors, electronics, computing, processes and machines are changing the way we create and share knowledge, how we design and fabricate artifacts, as well as approach and participate in innovation processes. This talk will demonstrate a new robotic toy platform where one can repurpose every day objects and quickly create personalized robots and program them with just using our hands. In this envisioned future, personalized manufacturing interfaces will lower the barrier for anyone to participate in the design and fabrication processes. We will demonstrate how our hands can be recreated dynamically using computer vision algorithms within augmented and virtual reality environments using new computer architectures, and geometric algorithms using deep learning. We are the interface to computers in this new era