Where can i buy siftables

Since it is simpler than a smart phone, it might be easier to work with for business students new to design. Alas, I am too early in the product cycle for what I want to do with the Sifteo cubes. The current design center for the cubes is for children as advertised. I can imagine that they would be a lot of fun and quite engaging for that age group. Just not so much for what I hoped to do with them. I created an account on the web and downloaded the Siftrunner software.

I loved the pictorial way that the software figures out which cube is which — you just press the picture on the cube that matches the image on the screen. I downloaded the Get Started game and was in for my first surprise — in order to play with the blocks you need to be within wireless range of the computer.

The sound comes out of the computer, not out of the Sifteo cubes. Not without a laptop. The Get Started game does a great job of showing you all of the capabilities of the cube — from the push button controlling of the action, to docking of the cubes together, to showing how the position in 3 space affects game play.

So much capability. The following photo is the setup for using the tilt function of the cubes to get the hat back on the head:. I then downloaded another game — Planet of Tune — that is about making generative music. With each game it is weird to start the game play by clicking PLAY in the web browser.

Several of the games then have some weird gyration you have to go through to arrange the blocks to get the game actually started. It probably helps to be a child. For me, I just keep rearranging the blocks through trial and error and then something finally happens. Planet of Tune is kind of cool as it has a record function so that you can replay the generative music you create.

The cognitive dissonance of having the blocks in one place and the sound coming from somewhere else is hard to get used to. On a laptop, the tinny sounding speakers make it worse. I suppose I could use headphones but that makes me even more connected to the computer. The business model for Sifteo is clear — the games store.

The most disappointing part of the Sifteo system is that you can customize very little. As a non-programmer all you can do is display different text or numbers on some of the sorting puzzles. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service technologyreview. Skip to Content. Sifteo cubes, shown above, are now available for preorder. Keep Reading. Most Popular.

By Clive Thompson archive page. By Will Douglas Heaven archive page. By Cat Ferguson archive page. Stay connected Illustration by Rose Wong. Sifteo, makers of Siftables, the ingenious cookie-sized computer blocks that play together in infinitely interesting ways, has today officially gone from MIT Media Lab research project to actual company.

Those seemingly simple attributes enable a nearly endless range of gaming and other interactive possibilities. Siftables blocks can transmit music cues to each other to become musical instruments, display letters or numbers for educational games, or interact with a console to become the controllers for a larger gaming system.