Now, this could be the way we’d read the newspapers in the near future, or are e-book readers or good old paper better? Come, you take a pick, but do read this to decide.
Designed by a group of students af the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, the Infractor is an interactive and artistic software application that is based on the article database of the New York Times i.e. information from 1985 to the present. Being an interactive application, it is developed basically for a multitouch table; wherein more than one person can work together at the same application.
The Infractor is interactive rays of light and its aberration by prisms, interactions of which are used to research, filter and display articles on the table, interaction on which is realized through physical Plexiglas objects. The articles from the database are placed as particles on the vacant table. A source object is then placed which gathers this loose information and displays the same in a ray.
The ray is split further with the help of prisms and controller object to let us choose different values out of a category of information available. This chosen category is then assigned to the ray which picks the information the viewer is interested in and with the help of a magnet the users pulls the information to his access, to view the complete article. Removing the magnet makes the article disappear. This is really going to make the entire activity really playful.
