Update- Apparently Flyfire is a secret still, since it looks like MIT has pulled the video, plus the website, just an hour or so after we posted this. Weird…

By Evan Ackerman

The problem with true three dimensional displays (displays that you can walk around) is that they require pixels to be floating in space. This has been done with lasers and plasma, but such technologies are super expensive and limited in many ways. MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) has hit upon the idea of creating huge free form three dimensional displays out of individual “smart pixels” made up of micro helicopters carrying LEDs:

Gigantic 3D displays made up of swarms of micro helicopters that can be released into any open space… How awesome is that? More, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By Evan Ackerman

In the future, all of our food will come in tubes. Why? Because that’s just how things work in the future (the pre-replicator future, obviously). And I know you’re thinking, “wow! That’s convenient!” But only uncultured heathens would eat food straight out of the tube. I mean, spluh! This is why you need a food printer, and MIT is getting way ahead of the future by starting to work on one in the present.

The Cornucopia personal food factory is essentially just a 3D printer that uses cartridges of food instead of cartridges of plastic or whatever. So like, if you feel like an apple, you just put an apple cartridge in, run the apple program, and wait while printer extrudes an apple shape. Heating and cooling elements in the print heads do all of the cooking for you, and by combining different cartridges in a single dish you can potentially create some truly horrific meals.

[ MIT Fluid Interfaces Group ] VIA [ Shapeways Blog ]